Introduction to JBoss jBPM - Tom Baeyens

This is one of a number of emerging tools that JBoss are currently pressing ahead with.

BPM (Business Process Managament) aims to represent business processes via a schematic which would then be used by developers to more easily provide a technical solution. The concept here is that it would be quicker and easier to move from the realm of the business analyst to the developer if a language can be used to more effectively described the business process to be rendered. At this level the problem then becomes one of providing an appropriate tool that the Business Analysts can use to trap their description, and which the developers can then use to generate the basis of the system.

JBoss are pushing jPDL which provides process descriptions based on XML Schema.

jBPM was described as offering a sophisticated state machine with workflow and service orchestration on a "multi-process language platform". Unfortunately we didn't see it in action so it looks like it needs some further investigation. I suspect this is akin to a rather expensive application Jim gave me a demo on a few weeks ago.

A couple of questions were asked which deserved a worthy mention around the following:

1. BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), or auditing, is currently being built into jBPM.
2. jBPM supports the deprecation of processes.

All in all it was quite a colourful session, but I suspect you need to have some practical experience with BPM tools before you can relate this to your own workplace. The reference to auditing caught my interest though, which is hard to do with subjects like that.