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Even though I almost live around the corner from Brussels, this year was the first time I went to the FOSDEM conference. I have to say that it was an impressive experience. Two days packed with hundreds of interesting talks about all things open source and thousands of attendees make this conference without doubt to an extremely interesting event. Add to this that it completely free and organized by a crew of motivated volunteers and you'll understand that it is truly exceptional.

 

Red Hat and JBoss had quite a good presence at the conference with more than 30(!) talks. In particular there was the JBoss.org devroom organized by Frédéric Hornain. The room had capacity of about 70 people and it was quite crowded at times.

 

Marek Goldman had the honour of kicking off the devroom with his talk about Boxgrinder. After that Geoffrey Desmet awed his audience talking about Drools Planner. Unfortunately the Openshift talk had to be canceled as the presenter didn't make it to the conference. Carlo de Wolf's talk about building AS7 for Fedora had without doubt some of the most passionate discussions. After Carlo, it was my turn to take the stage for my talk about JBoss Forge and Arquillian. Manik Surtani was up after me presenting on Infinispan. Right before Marco Rietveld and Geoffrey Desmet ended the day with a talk about Guvnor and jBPM, Heiko Rupp had a presentation on the RHQ project. All in all I thought this devroom was a big success and should if possible be repeated next year.

 

In my presentation I have explained how JBoss Forge and Arquillian are invaluable tools to help build Java EE 6 applications. I also have used the work of Adam Warski to show how easily a simple Forge plugin can be created for the Envers framework. The presentation consisted of three long demo parts with live coding and a slideshow that tied it all together. Unfortunately I forgot to hit the record button so I have no screencast available of the talk at this moment. As a console prize, you can take a look at the slides below though.

 

Cheers,

Koen

 

 

It has been a long time since any news has appeared about the jBPM graphical designer. The most important reason of this silence is a major refactoring of the internals of the plugin. As some may already have observed a number of alpha releases of this refactored plugin have appeared lately on our sourceforge download site. We are working towards a GA release for this next generation graphical designer in the end of April timeframe.

 

I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some of the new things that are supported in the designer. The reason why we decided to do the refactoring in the first place was in order to be able to fully support the complete jPDL process language. To more easily support all features of the jPDL constructs we decided to use the Eclipse tabbed properties pages. As an example, in the screenshot below you can see the possible editable properties of a swimlane with 'Actor' assignment type. Processdefinitions have additional property pages for tasks, actions and events.

The Tabbed Properties View

 

One of the much demanded features is the support of the superstate construct. Superstates are used as a convenient way to group nodes into related sets, denoting for instance phases in a process. The screen sample below shows the appearance of a superstate in the jPDL GPD.

A Superstate Example

 

A third thing that is worth mentioning is the contribution to the workbench of a jPDL perspective. This perspective assembles the views that are important to the user when editing workflows or process definitions.

The jPDL Perspective

The views that are included in this perspective are of course the tabbed properties view mentioned earlier, but also an outline view and a thumbnail overview of the graphical editor pane. In addition, the perspective adds convenient shortcuts to create new process definitions.

The Overview and Outline Views

 

During the coming weeks I will try to do some more posts to highlight some additional features. In the meantime, don't hesitate to try the new designer and to post your comments and feedback to our user's forum.

 

Regards,
Koen

 

P.S. If you are attending EclipseCon in Santa Clara this week, be sure to stop by our booth and have a chat with us. Or even better, come to my tutorial on GEF and Gavin's tutorial on our Rich Internet Application tools.

 

The jBPM team is pleased to announce new releases on both the 3.0 and the 3.1 branches. For the changes and bugfixes in these releases we refer to the release notes available in both distributions. As for the graphical designer, the 3.1.2 Starter's Kit contains GPD 3.0.11 whereas the 3.0.4 Starter's Kit contains GPD 3.0.10. Both GPD releases are build and tested against Eclipse 3.2 and WTP 1.5. There are no big functional additions with respect to the previous GPD release, only some minor fixes. A particular change in the GPD 3.0.11 is the removal of the JBoss jBPM runtime. If you install the plug-in in a new Eclipse installation, you will have to configure one or more runtimes before you can create new projects. This removes the dependency of each GPD release on a particular version of the jBPM runtime libraries. Of course all this comes preconfigured in the Starter's Kit.

 

Enough talking, if you are curious enough have a look for yourself. You can start at our download page. As always, comments and feedback is welcome on our user's forum.

Regards,
Koen

 

Tonight is the big party of the JBoss World event, but the jBPM team had another reason for a small party lately. We have been nominated one of the SD Times 100 in the category Business Process Management. This is already an achievement on itself, but what is remarkable is that we are listed second right after Tibco and before Microsoft.

 

As if this not enough, the comment of the editors really hits it right on.

"The Graph Oriented Programming in JBoss' jBPM is considered similar to that used in Microsoft's Workflow Foundation, introduced later. Where Microsoft follows..."

 

We hope this has made you curious enough to immediately go to our download pages and see for yourself that we really have a great product.

 

With regards,
the jBPM team

 

As promised a couple of weeks ago, we have released JBoss jBPM 3.1.1. Check the release notes for the applied changes and resolved bugs. As usual this latest release can be downloaded from our download page. Please use our active forum for questions and remarks.

 

Also, stay tuned because in the near future a number of other interesting releases are going to happen:

  • The first release of the 3.2 branch. It adds a number of interesting thing to jBPM such as an email node and JSF like expressions to be used in the process definitions.
  • Our BPEL extensions are entering the beta stage. Without doubt our BPEL guru Alejandro will elaborate on this when the moment arrives.


 

I also wanted to take this opportunity to shamelessly plug the different jBPM presentations during the upcoming JBoss World event.

We regularly receive requests for information about the use and adoption of JBoss jBPM in the real world. So it is evident that we are very happy to welcome to this great event a number of users that are going to testify about their use of jBPM.

 

I would certainly recommend you to register for JBoss World, come to Vegas, go to these interesting sessions and have a real big party with all of us. It will be fun!

 

Regards,
Koen

koen.aers

JBoss jBPM Online Demo!

Posted by koen.aers Apr 26, 2006

 

To show some of the features of jBPM, we have created a short demo of about 10 minutes. It focuses on the workflow capabilities of jBPM by showing how you can use the jBPM Graphical Process Designer (GPD) to create a simple process definition. The demo shows most of the main features of the GPD as well as how to deploy the created process to the jBPM server. Lastly, it uses the jBPM default web application to do a test drive of this deployed process.

 

The demo was created using the 3.0.3 release of the jBPM Starter's Kit. This package was released last week and contains the 3.0.3 release of the core jBPM libraries as well as the 3.0.9 release of the GPD. Downloads of these products are available from the jBPM download page. This is a maintenance release and contains a number of bug fixes. Also the GPD now has a nice deployment page that eases the process of deploying processes to the server significantly, as can be seen in the demo.

 

Stay tuned during the following weeks for some upcoming releases. The 3.1.1 maintenance release will appear shortly as well as the first alpha release on the 3.2 branch. There are some nice enhancenments of the web application, which will support facelets as the task form mechanism, as well as a brand new email node that will be included in this last one. So well worth keeping an eye on it...

Regards and have fun,
Koen

 

The announcement is a bit late, but we nevertheless wish to inform you of the 3.0.2 release of jBPM last week. This release fixes several bugs and minor issues for which we point you to the release notes. In addition there is also a new release of the graphical process designer plugin. This is the 3.0.5 release of this plugin. The biggest enhancement for this release is the ability to show and edit the transition names directly on the diagram. You'll find all you need on the JBoss jBPM download pages.

 

We have also decided to again include a starter's kit bundled with a complete Eclipse installation with this release. We feel that it lowers the barrier to get started with jBPM a lot. Firing up the jBPM server and exploring the websale sample process is only one mouseclick away, tweaking and changing the websale process yet another click. This download is only available for Windows from here . Users of other OS's will have to stick to getting a separate Eclipse download for their platform and installing the plugin themselves. But for the Windows users there is no excuse for not starting this download immediately.

 

Have fun, Koen

 

jBPM is a fully featured workflow and BPM engine. Also a new version of the Graphical Process Designer (GPD) was released. New feature highlights of the core jBPM are asynchronous process continuation, improved flexibility of the persistence API and task instance variables. The persistence API has been changed maintaining backward compatibility with the 3.0 release. Purpose of these changes was amongst others to use Hibernate more directly whitout too much unnecessary wrapping.

 

The 3.0.4 release of the GPD now fully supports swimlane configuration through an additional swimlanes tab in the editor and the properties configuration page of tasks. Another new feature in the GPD is grid support to improve the looks of the process graphs.

 

The new releases are available on the sourceforge download area : http://sourceforge.net/projects/jbpm

 

All feedback is welcome on the JBoss jBPM User Forum.

Regards, Koen

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