EAR for BPM services

[jimrigsbee]

Howdy,

Last night I discovered that I'm going to need to use an EAR to make sure my MDB and SLSB get deployed correctly. It is also good J2EE practice :)

I believe the WAR should become part of this as well. Any objections?

I'll create the EAR staging in the resources folder like I did the MDB and SLSB and we can add the WAR into the ant script when you are ready, if you agree.

Have a great day!

Regards, Jim

[tom.baeyens]

we should support both EAR and WAR.

By default i want a war that is also deployable on tomcat...

I don't mind if there are targets that build and deploy an ear in the build.deploy.xml.

[jimrigsbee]

No problem, I agree...forgot about pure servlet containers like Tomcat, good catch.

Regards, Jim

[svetzal]

I think ClassLoader issues will plague anyone deploying the WAR to JBoss who does not understand them. Right now, I class myself there - slowly untangling what I need to understand to complete the vision in my head.

Domain-specific ActionHandler classes that are direct EJB clients is one area I've had trouble.

Right now, our strategy is decoupling the workflow from the domain logic using JMS queues, but I expect others will share my initial desire to use domain-specific logic in their ActionHandlers.

One thing I have not yet tried is bundling the jbpm.sar in the EAR so that it too shares the same class-loader, but this seems non-scalable - especially if you want to orchestrate several applications with a single workflow engine.

My panacea is an isolated workflow engine that can have workflows arbitrarily deployed to it, each with self-contained domain knowledge (ie ejb-client jars embedded).

Am I crazy here not being able to get this to work easily? Perhaps our stand-alone process deployer is not doing something that it should be?

 public void init(DeploymentInfo di) throws DeploymentException {
 log.info("Deploying jBPM archive: " + di.url);

 try {
 // parse for getting name
 ProcessDefinition processDef = ProcessDefinition.parseParZipInputStream(new ZipInputStream(new FileInputStream(di.url.getPath())));
 String name = processDef.getName();

 InitialContext iniCtx = new InitialContext();
 JbpmConfiguration conf = (JbpmConfiguration) iniCtx.lookup("java:/jbpm/JbpmConfiguration");

 ZipInputStream zipInputStream = new ZipInputStream(new FileInputStream(di.url.getPath()));
 ProcessDefinition pd = ProcessDefinition.parseParZipInputStream(zipInputStream);

 JbpmContext ctx = conf.createJbpmContext();
 ctx.deployProcessDefinition(pd);

 ProcessDefinition latestPd = ctx.getGraphSession().findLatestProcessDefinition(name);
 if (latestPd != null) {
 log.info("Deployed process \"" + name + "\" version: " + latestPd.getVersion());
 } else {
 log.info("Error deploying: " + name);
 }

 } catch (NamingException e) {
 e.printStackTrace();
 } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
 e.printStackTrace();
 }
 }