JBoss jBPM Overview

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 can be used in the simplest environment like an ant task and scale up to a clustered J2EE application.

JBoss jBPM and Workflow Patterns

In the past years, a large number of specification efforts have been done in the area of process definition languages : e.g. WfMC's XPDL, BPML, ebXML, BPEL4WS, XLANG, WSCI, ... Using one of these specification would have been problematic for various reasons:

Too many specification and not one standard
Far too complex
No easy mechanism for coupling integration code to business process logic

The academic world has been involved with process modelling since the 70's. It is strange to see that the commercial products being built in the industry differ so much from the work that is already done by the academics. The sad part about this is that there is absolutely no consensus about process modelling which blocks large investements in this area.

One piece of research is especially valuable - Workflow Patterns. Prof. Wil van der Aalst has created a catalogue of workflow patterns analogue with the design patterns by the 'Gang of Four'. These patterns are a organised set of concepts that are distilled from the study of a wide range of commercial workflow products. JBoss jBPM's internal model is created with these workflow patterns in mind. This guarantees that JBoss jBPM is able to support the most powerful process language constructs. On the other hand, JBoss jBPM is created to be simple and only expose the compex features to the advanced users.