JBoss jBPM is a workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) engine that enables the creation of business processes that coordinate between people, applications and services. In this article, S.Satyamoorthy, Director of Operations - Asia Pacific, JBoss Inc. takes a close look at what JBoss jBPM has to offer.

Simplified BPM integration with JBoss jBPM

Abstract

JBoss jBPM is a flexible, extensible workflow management system. Business processes, expressed in a simple and powerful language and packaged in process archives, serve as input for the JBoss jBPM runtime server. JBoss jBPM bridges the gap between managers and developers by giving them a common language : the JBoss jBPM Process definition language (jPdl). This gives software project managers much more control on their software development efforts. After loading the process archive, users or systems perform single steps of the process. JBoss jBPM maintains the state, logs and performs all automated actions. JBoss jBPM combines easy development of workflow-applications with excellent enterprise application integration (EAI) capabilities. JBoss jBPM includes a web-application and a scheduler. JBoss jBPM is a clusterable J2EE application.

Business Process Management

BPM (Business Process Management) offers a structure and approach for designing business actions/transactions and executing them preferably using automated processes, actions, tasks and flows.

For eg. an insurance company can use BPM to automate the steps involved in processing insurance claims, a finance company can use BPM for loan approval, an HR department for employee performance management etc.,.

There have been several attempts to provide enterprise application integration, unified view of the business, homogenous flow of information across islands in an enterprise, but wide scale BPM acceptance have been very slow. This is due to several reasons including: cost and complexity.

One obstacle however, is that BPM platform solutions typically require a major investment of time and training, without any guarantee of success. As a result, developers frequently choose to avoid the complications and risk of BPM and instead code state and business logic directly into enterprise applications as usual.

The Marketplace

The BPM market is very fragmented with several standards and tens of vendors offering very costly but proprietary implementations. Most tools either cater to Managers / Business analysts and makes integration effort of developers a nightmare or are easy to develop, but extremely complicated to design real life application scenarios.

Many vendors of BPMS and Work Flow systems want you to believe that with their graphical process designer it only takes a business analyst to create process definitions. The reason for this is - programming is hard. The sales people tell you: "look, you don't have to write a single line of code". While not having to write code is a good thing, most vendors go overboard on this and don't foresee a mechanism to integrate code into a process definition in cases where this is appropriate. This means that instead of programming, you fight the tool to perform custom processes. In real life when using a WFMS as an EAI-platform, integrating code into a process is a must. Developing process definitions requires input from and collaboration between business analysts and software developers.

JBoss jBPM

JBoss jBPM bridges the gap between business managers and developers by giving them a common language : the JBoss jBPM Process definition language (jPDL). This gives software project managers much more control on their software development efforts. After loading the process archive, users or systems perform single steps of the process. JBoss jBPM maintains the state, logs and performs all automated actions. JBoss jBPM combines easy development of workflow-applications with excellent enterprise application integration (EAI) capabilities.

JBoss jBPM is a standard Java application and does not need an application server. Enterprises that are interested in automating business processes can use JBoss jBPM without more application server complexity. JBoss jBPM can also be deployed by ISVs in a Web application or a standalone Java application.

The primary focus of JBoss JBoss jBPM development has been the BPM core engine. Properly orchestrating business processes across multiple applications is a complicated task. To meet this challenge, a business process engine needs a solid technical basis. JBoss jBPM is based on a powerful and simple core engine with bottom up approach naturally combining a declarative model and java deployment freedom. Its easy programming model enables applications to be up and running in less then half a day.

JBoss jBPM is a workflow management system (WFMS). Figure1 shows the interfaces between JBoss jBPM and all actors involved in the form of a use case diagram.

Figure 1: Interfaces of a WFMS

JBoss jBPM takes process archives as input. A process archive is a formal description of a business process. After a process archive is deployed, JBoss jBPM can manage the executions of this process. 'Managing the executions' means keeping track of the state of a process (State layer), storing information associated with a process execution (Context layer), integrating custom programming logic like e.g. sending emails, interacting with an ERP, ... (Programming logic layer) and optionally allow users to complete tasks by submitting forms (User interfaces layer).