Help: Starting a project with jBPM - version, tomcat, bundle

[the_rage]

Hello there!

I'm starting a project and am evaluating jBPM for workflow needs.

However merely getting jBPM to install and work with a simple workflow has proven to be too much of a burden so far. So before I throw it out of the window - because it is well referenced -, I'd like to know:

- should I use version 3 or 4? Which one is stable and recommended for production?

- if version 3 is the stable one, which package should I use? 3.2.6 seems to have the most recent date; versions up to 3.3.1 have been released... what does this mean?

- I intend to use Tomcat; in previous versions there was an ant script which created an application for tomcat deployment, but no longer seems to exist; is there an alternative method?

- I'd like jBPM to be bundled with my java Web App. Is there any documented way to do this? I mean I don't intend to have a standalone jBPM unless that is absolutely necessary.

- in my previous attempts with version 3, I had my share of problems deploying workflows. I'd like to know how I can deploy them non-programmatically after I have jBPM running on Tomcat.


Thank you in advance for your time and attention,

Francisco Passos

[kukeltje]

1: 3 is stable for a long time, the first official 4 release will be out by the end of the month.

2: Answer could be found by searching the forum (ok should have been mentioned more explicitly in another place but anyhow....) The 3.3 releases are 'withdrawn', The major difference was support for the upcommming console and some db updates which had to be reverted. functionality wise there were not many differences.So 3.2.6SP1 is the latest

3: It's a few jars and dependencies nothing more.The basics of which jars is described to some extend in the docs, but if you use maven, most can be resolved via that mechanism.

4: Yes. like you would embed any other jar or set of jars. Nothing spelcial about it. Sure you could have some library clashes but that is also not different than with other jars and dependencies, e.g. xml libs, dom libs etc... common java issues with other apps as well.

5: What is deploying non-programatically? Via pigeons? There are ant tasks that can deploy a definition to a database, but that requires configuring a database for this task. If you do it from your own application it is nothing more than passing an xml file to a deploy method. This is done in many of the testcases as well and can be seen in some examples in the forum. You could build a webapp where you upload that file and pass it to the deploy method. Really no rocket-science. But if you do not tell us what your problems were, we can only guess and that is never good.