Here's a retrospective to the JBoss jBPM activities and feedback we received at this year's JavaOne conference.

Workflow and BPM systems have been around for a while now and orchestration engines are mushrooming all over the place. Despite the fact that all of these systems have similar goals, it is impossible to find 2 concrete solutions that are based on a common foundation. Each solution is a unique mix of functionalities. Unique mixes might be great at a coctail party but regrettably the analogy doesn't stand. You can safely trust us on this one, we seached hard but couldn't to find that analogy...

This fragmentation of the workflow, BPM and orchestration landscape leaves the industry in an orphaned position. Without common foundations model, there is no mindshare and almost no progress. The value of such a foundations model can be best understood if we look at the database world. There, you have 3 well known paradigms: the relational model, hierarchical databases and object orietented databases. No such model existed yet for workflow, BPM and orchestration.

Many people didn't realize such a model was missing and only felt confused by the diversity of the BPM offerings. In my session, we launched the idea of a unified model: Graph Oriented Programming. We had massive positive feedback after the talk and at the booth. People were very enthousiast and hopefull that this new model will bring unification and thereby opening up a whole new array of possibilities.

It took us 4 years of extensive research to develop the Graph Oriented Programming model. During that time, we developed a simple but powerfull kernel module. The open source community continiously challenged us and helped in defining solutions. Now, we have delivered proof that this model is capable of supporting all 3 domains: workflow, BPM and orchestration. The JBoss jBPM product is build on this model and is the only BPM engine that is able to support multiple process languages on the same kernel (plain POJO) software. JBoss jBPM has support for JPDL, which is a language focussed on managing tasklists for people and it also has a very clean integration with standard Java. But jBPM also has support for BPEL, an orchestration process language.

This unification in process modelling foundations also removes the necessity for multiple process engines in one software project. Instead of having to use a workflow engine and a separate orchestration engine, you now can just use the workflow extension and the orchestration extension of the same product.

So don't wait any longer. JBoss jBPM version 3.0 has been released just before JavaOne and you can download it today and take a look at what this means in practice.