Eric D. Schabell

JBoss Developer Studio 5 - how to setup SOA Tools (BRMS example)

2012-05-29T16:22:00.000+02:00

Step 2: SOA Tools Update Site

Even though you might think this is self evident, I am always looking around again for the exact way to get started with JBoss Developers Studio (JBDS) and the latest greatest Business Rules Management System (BRMS) tooling. For posterity, here is how I do it:

Step 3: JBoss BRMS tooling

Get the latest JBDS 5 from your local Customer Support Portal (CSP) or get your evaluation copy.
You are missing the BRMS tooling, so add the JBoss SOA Tools update site via "Help -> Install New Software..." : https://devstudio.jboss.com/updates/5.0/staging/soa-tooling/
Select "BRMS Tooling"

After install you are ready to rock with all the new tooling supporting Rules, Events and Processes (jBPM).

JBoss One Day Talk 2012 - JBoss BRMS Sneak Peek

2012-05-22T09:55:00.000+02:00

I have been invited to talk at the JBoss One Day Talk 2012 in Munich, Germany on October 10th, 2012. I will be presenting the following session:

JBoss BRMS sneak peek, the future is now for your Business Processes
A Business Process Management System (BPMS) offers you the capabilities to better manage and streamline your business processes. JBoss continues expanding its vision in this area by offering a lightweight process engine for executing business processes, combined with the necessary services and tooling to support business processes in their entire life-cycles.

This allows not only developers but also business users to manage your business processes more efficiently. A lot has happened in the BPM area over the last few years, with the introduction of the BPMN 2.0 standard, the increasing interest in more dynamic and adaptive processes, integration with business rules and event processing, case management, etc. In this session, we will show you how JBoss BRMS leverages the jBPM project to tackle these challenge and give you an overview of its most important BPMS features.

Video Recording: JBoss Brings More Power to your Business Processes

2012-03-04T18:53:00.000+01:00

The great group over in Luxembourg (YaJUG) put up a recording on parleys.com of the jBPM5 session I gave in January 2012. This took place after a previous talk and I have just changed 'uniform' to put on the JBoss shirt.

I cover BPM, jBPM and the jBPM Migration project. Enjoy!

Portugal JUG (PTJUG) - a night of jBPM and OpenShift

2012-02-20T13:32:00.000+01:00

As previously posted, I was in Lisbon last week to meet with the Portugal Java User Group (PTJUG) and present on the jBPM5 project followed by OpenShift.

The flight into town is worth mentioning as you come into the city itself, making for some really spectacular views of castles, old churches and just beautiful Portugese architecture stacked against the hills of Lisbon. It was also great to come from the colder Netherlands into a summer temperature of 16 degrees (for my home location, that is summer)!

Bull fighting ring

The location was the Instituto Supirior Technico, situated right close to the center. I had a bit of time to get ready so on the advice of my hotel I walked two blocks down the road in the lovely summer like sunshine to view a bull fighting ring. Set the mood for the event session!

I arrived at the event location to be greeted by a group from the PTJUG and we got settled in the room. Before we started they made sure I met each and everyone that was attending, from consultants, engineers, developers, analysts, managers and even a professor. It was a very relaxed and sociable group of guys (not to forget, the single lady that showed up to claim the first ever OpenShift Ladies T-shirt!). We had a total of ~30 people show for the talks, but I forgot to actually count. I did notice that the 40 OpenShift t-shirts I brought did not survive the end of the event!

jBPM 5
We talked jBPM first, with quite a bit of interaction as there were users with experience in jBPM3 in the audience. We demo'ed the round tripping, jBPM console, the diverse IDE tooling support and looked extensively at the web designer. I also provided a peak at the early access bits of the upcoming JBoss Business Rules Management System product that will contain the newer jBPM5 components.

There were some questions around the various integrations and an interesting request to provide an open source evaluation of the new jBPM5 to place along side the existing one on the Workflow Patterns site. We also spent time discussing and digging into the jBPM Migration project as a preview of what the migration possibilities might be moving forward.

JBoss Brings More Power to your Business Processes (PTJUG)

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OpenShift
After a short break we moved on to the OpenShift session. This talk was about getting the audience into the session, so I pushed actually from the start of the entire event to have them sign up for an OpenShift account with their laptops and to follow along. We walked through the Express setup, client tools and focused a lot in the demo section on the Java tooling provided by JBossTools project. This was enforced by doing the demo through both Eclipse with JBossTools and with JBoss Developer Studio 5. This early release version integrates the OpenShift wizards and tooling to get you started.

An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your Code into the Cloud (PTJUG)

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell

The event concluded with a nice discussion around the possibilities of clustering Express instances, how to interact between two nodes of Express and what the advantages of Flex would be. Some of the audience had already used OpenShift for personal projects. I was asked if I wanted to come back before the end of the year to talk about OpenShift updates as the Open Sourcing and exposing the cartridge API will be of great interest for this group.

It was a great time with experiences Java users, jBPM users and the interaction was nice during both talks. I really enjoyed this event and look forward to meeting up with the PTJUG anytime in the future!

JUDCon 2012 Boston - Getting your migration on with jBPM Migration Project

2012-02-03T14:00:00.000+01:00

Boston, June 25-26

The call for papers is open, but not official on the website yet. I thought I would submit my sessions before I get snowed under (really, it is below zero here in NL all week, skating on the canals, snow today...). Hope to get accepted and see you all there!

Getting your migration on with jBPM Migration Project

With the release of jBPM 5 in the Red Hat product JBoss BRMS 5.3 it is time to closely examine your existing legacy jBPM 3 projects for migration. What does the future bring?

This session will take a look at the background of jBPM 3 process projects and present how we plan to help you make the jumpt to jBPM 5. We will provide you with a plan for positioning your existing Enterprise jBPM projects and examine some of the architectural layers involved. We will take a closer look at the tooling being created for this and steps you can take to ensure a smooth transition moving into your jBPM future.

Finally we will demo the existing tooling on an actual existing enterprise jBPM project. This will provide you with a real life scenario to take home as an example for your own BPM projects.

Portugal Java User Group (JUG) - on tour with jBPM and Openshift

2012-01-27T09:43:00.000+01:00

I will be in Lisbon, Portugal on Feb 16 at the Portugal JUG with sessions on jBPM and OpenShift. The abstracts are below and will soon be published on their JUG site, but it is in Portuguese so you might need some translation help!

JBoss jBPM Brings More Power to your Business Processes

A Business Process Management System (BPMS) offers you the capabilities to better manage and streamline your business processes. JBoss jBPM continues its vision in this area by offering a lightweight process engine for executing business processes, combined with the necessary services and tooling to support business processes in their entire life-cycles. This allows not only developers but also business users to manage your business processes more efficiently.

A lot has happened in the BPM area over the last few years, with the introduction of the BPMN 2.0 standard, the increasing interest in more dynamic and adaptive processes, integration with business rules and event processing, case management, etc. In this session, we will show you how jBPM5 tackles these challenges, discuss migration to this new platform and give you an overview of its most important features.

An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your code into the Cloud

Whether you're a seasoned Java developer looking to start hacking on EE6 or you just wrote your first line of Ruby yesterday, the cloud is turning out to be the perfect environment for developing applications in just about any modern language or framework. There are plenty of clouds and platform-as-a-services to choose from, but where to start? Join us for an action-packed hour of power where we'll show you how to deploy an application written in the language of your choice - Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl or Python, with the framework of your choice - EE6, CDI, Seam, Spring, Zend, Cake, Rails, Sinatra, PerlDancer or Django to the OpenShift PaaS in just minutes. And without having to rewrite your app to get it to work the way the cloud provider thinks your app should work.

Check the command-line fu as we leverage Git to onboard apps onto OpenShift Express in seconds, while also making use of the web browser do the heavy-lifting of provisioning clusters, deploying, monitoring and auto-scaling apps in OpenShift Flex.

If you want to learn how the OpenShift PaaS and investing an hour of your time can change everything you thought you knew about developing applications in the cloud, this session is for you!

The schedule is shaping up like this:

17h30 - Welcome and registration
18h00 - JBoss Brings More Power to your Business Processes
19h00 - An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your Code into the Cloud
20h00 - Drink and Networking

Location will be at Instituto Superior TA(c)cnico (IST), see you there? ;-)

Luxembourg Java User Group (YaJUG) - OpenShift and jBPM session recap

2012-01-18T16:36:00.000+01:00

Room filling up, ~50 attendees!

Last night I was on site for an evening with the YaJUG, hosted in the Tudor building which was a very nice venue in downtown Luxembourg.

There were around 50 participants and the interaction was rather lively, I think I got something like ~20 questions around just the OpenShift session! The questions ranged from the obvious to the more cunning where participants not only want to be able to tinker with apache configurations but also auto scale their Express instances or even try to cluster the 5 free instances we offer them. I love that kind of ingenuity!

His first app on OpenShift
by end of the
session!

I wanted to emphasize the ease with which anyone can get their applications running in the OpenShift Express cloud instances. I challenged the group from the start by asking anyone with a laptop to get it open and try to deploy their first application into the OpenShift cloud by the end of the evening. As you can see in the picture, Weber Phillipp (I think it was actually his little brother if I am not mistaken...) came up to me at the end to show his results, well done!

Later I followed up with a look at OpenShift Flex where most of the more Enterprise type of questions were answered. Check out twitter tag #yajug for their comments, but be aware, some of the feedback is in French.

The second session was an overview of the status of jBPM 5 and included a rather in depth discussion of the upcoming BRMS 5.3 as there was some real interest in the JBoss product that are supported. There were several jBPM 3.2 users in the crowd, so spend some time demo'ing not only jBPM5 but the web designer and jBPM Migration Project tooling that has been integrated there.

The sessions were recorded so the YaJUG members will be provided a link to them soon via their site and a photographer was also enthusiastically taking lots of pictures! We planned to record my session desktop for the demo's, but the recording failed to start.

An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your Code into the Cloud

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell

JBoss jBPM, the future is now (YaJUG session)

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell

UPDATE: The session had a photographer that was busy snapping away:

Codemotion 2012 - submissions for jBPM and OpenShift

2012-01-11T16:41:00.001+01:00

I am again submitting proposals to Codemotion 2012, this year in Rome. I have pushed out two talks, one on jBPM and another on OpenShift:

JBoss Brings More Power to your Business Processes
A lot has happened in the Business Process Management area over the last few years, with the intro of the BPMN 2.0 standard, the increasing interest in more dynamic and adaptive processes, integration with business rules and event processing, case management, etc. In this session, we will show you how JBoss jBPM tackles these challenges, discuss migration to this new platform and give an overview of its most important features.

Get your code into the Cloud with OpenShift

Whether you're a seasoned Java developer looking to start hacking on EE6 or you just wrote your first line of Ruby yesterday, the cloud is perfect for developing apps in any modern language or framework. Join us for an action-packed hour of power where we'll show you how to deploy an application written in a language of your choice - Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl or Python, with a framework of your choice - EE6, CDI, Seam, Zend, Rails, Sinatra, PerlDancer or Django to the OpenShift PaaS in just minutes.

Fingers crossed and hope to talk to you in Rome, Italy in March! ;-)

jBPM5 - add native Eclipse BPMN2 Visual Editor to Eclipse or JBoss Developer Studio

2012-01-10T10:03:00.001+01:00

Eclipse Native BPMN2 Editor

Interested in using the Eclipse native BPMN2 editor when designing your jBPM processes? Here is how you can pull in the project that is now hosted within the Eclipse Foundation.

Figure 1: Name the update site.

First you need to add the update site at Help -> Install New Software -> Add as shown in Figure 1. Then you give it a name as shown in Figure 2.

http://download.eclipse.org/bpmn2-modeler/site

Figure 2: Watch install.

This will pull up the BPMN2 Editor check box that you can select to install the editor. Just select this box and select Next + Next + Accept agreement + Finish.

Figure 3: Open with Visual Editor

Watch the software install, see Figure 2 and a restart will give you the option to use the Eclipse Native BPMN2 editor. Select a process.bpmn2 file, right mouse click, select Open With and you should see the menu entry BPMN2 Visual Editor.

Note:
A note about the processes to be displayed. If you do not have any location information in the file, such as a default generated jBPM Migration Tool conversion output file, then it will not display in this editor. The jBPM Migration Tool relies on the BPMN2 Process Editor and its Arrange buttons to generate this information.

Enjoy! ;-)

YaJUG event - an evening with OpenShift and jBPM

2012-01-09T08:59:00.000+01:00

I will be in Luxembourg next week to present a few interesting technologies for the Java User Group, called YaJUG. The abstracts are below and you can find the details if you happen to be in the area online at their site:

An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your Code into the Cloud: Eric D. Schabell (Red Hat)

If you want to learn how the OpenShift PaaS and investing an hour of your time can change everything you thought you knew about developing applications in the cloud, this session is for you!

JBoss Brings More Power to your Business Processes: Eric D. Schabell (Red Hat)

A Business Process Management System (BPMS) offers you the capabilities to better manage and streamline your business processes. JBoss jBPM continues its vision in this area by offering a lightweight process engine for executing business processes, combined with the necessary services and tooling to support business processes in their entire lifecycles. This allows not only developers but also business users to manage your business processes more efficiently.

17h30 - Welcome and registration
18h00 - An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your Code into the Cloud
19h00 - JBoss Brings More Power to your Business Processes
20h00 - Drink and Networking

See you there? ;-)

Released jBPM Migration Tooling v0.11

2012-01-06T12:36:00.002+01:00

Right behing release the previous release we have pushed out jBPM Migration Tooling v0.11.

Wow, you must be thinking this team is working really hard and must not be getting any sleep at all! Nothing could be further from the truth. We are just getting integrated into the JBoss family way of working with regards to releasing a project into the wild.

We were missing some necessary components that need to be generated by our Maven configuration so that we were allowed through the JBoss Nexus process. When jbpmmigration-0.10 failed to meet the Nexus standards, we are forced to restart the process and therefore you now can be the proud owners of jbpmmigration-0.11! ;-)

The change log can be found on the project wiki, but for posterity it is provided here:

update the project POM file to generate a sources jar, needed to deploy into JBoss Nexus.

The OpenShift jBPM Migration WebApp has been updated to run with the current release, http://jbpmmigration-ishereon.rhcloud.com/jbpmmigration_upload-0.4.

Enjoy!

Released jBPM Migration Tooling v0.10

2012-01-04T09:25:00.002+01:00

A new year and a new version is appropriate, don't you think? :-)

The jBPM Migration Tooling project is happy to release v0.10 into the wild, you can get it from github and soon in the JBoss Nexus repository.

The change log can be found on the project wiki, but for posterity it is provided here:

issue 41 resolved, unique ids for context variables.
issue 42 resolved, added ability to select xsd to use for conversion, default is jpdl 3.2.
issue 43 resolved, adjusted stylesheet usage in migration class.
issue 44 resolved, added JbpmMigration test class.
issue 46 & 47 resolved, cleaned up api for JpdlValidation and BpmnValidation classes.
issue 48 resolved, test output is now sorted in the directories related to the called tests, provides overview of all migration test output after a testing run, was over writing previously.
issue 51 resolved, pom adjusted to provide an optional cli jar (more dependencies included in resulting jar).
issue 52 resolved, fixed gateway nodes to provide gatewayDirection attributed needed by some editors to correctly display.
maven pom adjustments for JBoss jBPM team jenkens setup.

The OpenShift jBPM Migration WebApp has been updated to run with the current release, http://jbpmmigration-ishereon.rhcloud.com/jbpmmigration_upload-0.3/.

Enjoy!

Open Source Conference 2011 - OpenShift, jBPM and much more in Amsterdam at OSC11

2011-12-15T09:42:00.000+01:00

OSC11 ready to rock!

Some time ago I mentioned that I would be giving talks on jBPM and OpenShift at OSC11, well let me tell you a bit about that experience!

Scott Crenshaw interview.

Interview
It all started on Thursday afternoon when I arrived at the hotel in Amsterdam to check in. Our VP Cloud, Scott Crenshaw was stuck in traffic coming back from a customer visit and I was asked to fill in for him with a reporter from CloudWorks. I got the chance to focus more on OpenShift than on the general Red Hat strategy until Scott arrived, at which time I was able to relax and snap a few pictures of him doing his magic.

View from 17th floor.

After that I got the chance to actually go up to my room before heading over to the venue. I have never stayed 17 floors above Amsterdam, but as you can see, the view was amazing over Central Train Station and the river behind it. I know, the photo looks like a hotel room with a painting on the wall, but believe me that is the view over the city. At night you could just sit in your hotel room and stare out the window at the city lights.

Keynote Scott Crenshaw

Setup PTA
At the venue, the Amsterdam Passenger Terminal (PTA), the local cruise ship terminal, we arrived with our technical team to ensure a few things were going to be working smoothly for the demos and sessions. The rooms I would be talking in were about 80 seats, so nice for break-out sessions! We hung a few banners, watched the crews setup the main stage and then headed for our hotel to get ready for the Speakers Dinner.

OpenShift t-shirt was a hit!

Speaker Dinner
That evening there was a speakers dinner that started with drinks, then food and finished up in a lounge bar on the top floor of the Mint Hotel, again, another nice view over the city of Amsterdam. The nice part was chatting with the various keynote speakers, where I got some time with the VP from Alfresco talking BPM and with Scott Crenshaw talking OpenShift a bit.

Open Source Conference
Friday was the big event, we got there early and watched around 800 attendees (more than doubling the number from last year) appearing slowly out of the morning fog to come enjoy a day filled with Open Source and networking. It was amazing to see the PTA filled up with customers, partners and contacts that I know from my years of working on Open Source. It was not possible to cross the main floor without getting stopped by someone at least 3 times, amazing interactions!

The OpenShift talk was packed full with all seats eventually taken and standing room filled on the sides. Even though the talks were only 30 minutes, it was possible to get some nice interactions with the crowd. I got some interesting Python and PHP questions, passed out a few goodies and after the talk even had to give away the last t-shirt I was wearing to a fan! The jBPM talk was filled also and again had to put a lot of information into the short time frame, but there were some really nice reactions to the talk in discussions after the session and on Twitter.

Both sessions slides will be made available via the OSC website, but I will include them here for all to enjoy. It was a long day, a busy day, but filled with great people at a great location. I am seriously looking forward to next years event and wonder if we can double the attendance again!

OSC11 - An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your Code into the Cloud

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OSC11 - The future is now for all your Business Processes

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JAX 2012 - Integration woes, solving the migration to BPMN2

2011-12-07T20:56:00.001+01:00

Submitted a talk to JAX 2012, fingers crossed!

Abstract:
We stand now on the brink of a revolution. The future calls to us with a promise of standardized processes and a specification to lead us. There is one small catch... what to do with our existing enterprise integration projects? This session will help you position your existing JBoss projects for the challenges of migrating to the JBoss Business Process Management System with real world examples.

JAX 2012 - The future is now for all your Business Processes

2011-12-07T20:55:00.001+01:00

Submitted a talk to JAX 2012, fingers crossed!

Abstract:
A lot has happened in the BPM area over the last few years, with the intro of the BPMN 2.0 standard, the increasing interest in more dynamic and adaptive processes, integration with business rules and event processing, case management, etc. In this session, we will show you how JBoss tackles these challenges, discuss migration to this new platform and give an overview of its most import features.

jBPM Web Designer integrates jBPM Migration Tooling in the OpenShift Cloud

2011-10-25T08:45:00.000+02:00

New migration feature

Last week the jBPM Web Designer screen-casted the release of a new version (well, a beta anyway) that includes some pretty neat features. The one we here in the jBPM Migration Project team are most proud of is that they have exposed the jBPM Migration Tooling!

paste in jpdl3.2 + gpd files

We thought it would be nice to provide a playground in the OpenShift Cloud for you the public to give it a try. Here are a few screenshots showing the designer, the import pop-up with a jBPM3.2 process definition and the corresponding gpd file containing positioning information and finally the migrtated BPMN2 process definition.

Here are the example jPDL and GPD sources so you can directly cut&paste them into the migration pop-up to test it:

jPDL3.2 process definition source



 
  
 

 
  
   A human task.
  
  
   
    A test task.

GPD location information source

You can't save the process, but you can view the source in various forms with the tabs at the bottom of the screen. Give the BPMN2 tab a try!

View source tabs

I will be presenting this and more on the current status of the jBPM Migration Project in London next week at JUDCon. The session is entitled, Launching into the future with jBPM Migration Project.

See you there? ;-)

London JBug - JBoss jBPM Night (slides)

2011-10-18T01:19:00.000+02:00

I gave the talk entitled, JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes tonight for about 30 attendees. It was pretty interactive with the audience showing a real interest in the new jBPM5 tooling, flexible processes and migration tooling.

Thanks again to all who turned up and the pizza was great afterwards!

Here are the slides:

JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell.

A few pictures were taken while I was talking:

London JBUG - 17 Oct 2011

jBPM Migration Tooling available in the OpenShift Cloud!

2011-10-05T14:38:00.000+02:00

After our latest evening of coding on the jBPM Migration project we were able to fix quite a few bugs and pushed a web based jBPM Migration application into the cloud that enables everyone to play with the migration tooling right now!

I admit, it is in a crude form, but I am a fan of release early (if not often due to real life!). We will be massaging this to spiffy it up a bit, but the idea is there. You can upload your jBPM 3.2 process definition file (processdefinition.xml) and on the results page you will find a copy of your jPDL and below that the resulting BPMN2 XML. This is not formatted, but you can paste it into your IDE for formatting, viewing in the diverse jBPM5 editor tools and verify your process is migrated.

Even better, you can replicate this setup by following our Readme in the jBPM Migration Upload project. The basic steps to setup an OpenShift JBoss AS 7 instance and deploy the jBPM Migration Tool is as follows:

jBPM Migration Tooling on OpenShift Express
Installing the jBPM Migration tool on OpenShift was never easier! This git repository helps you get up and running quickly with the jBPM Migration Tooling.

# Running on OpenShift.
# Create an account at http://openshift.redhat.com/
#
# Create a jbossas-7.0 application
#
$ rhc-create-app -l $username -a jbpmmigration -t jbossas-7.0

# Add this upstream openshift-jbpmmigration repo.
#
$ cd jbpmmigration
$ git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/eschabell/openshift-jbpmmigration.git
$ git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master
    
# Then push the repo upstream.
#
$ git push

That's it, you can now checkout your application at: http://jbpmmigration-$your_domain.rhcloud.com/jbpmmigration_upload-0.1

Usage notes: You can submit a jBPM jPDL 3.2 process definition as an xml file upload, the resulting page will show you first your submitted file (if all goes well) and the resulting BPMN2 process definition. This can be cut and paste into your IDE for formatting and testing against the jBPM5 editor(s).

I will be discussing this tooling at JUDCon in London and the London JBUG, drop by and we can chat about it. For now, get busy and start testing your process definitions before migration to jBPM5! ;-)

London JBUG - JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes

2011-09-23T13:41:00.000+02:00

I have been invited to talk at the London JBoss User Group (JBUG) for their JBoss jBPM night. Below you will find the location, times and agenda.

Where?

Atos Origin Offices, LTQ Meeting Room, 4 Triton Square (please use the main reception entrance), London NW1 3HG

Agenda

17:00 - 17:30 - Coffee, Welcome and Networking

17:30 - 18:00 - Lightning talks

18:00 - 18:15 - Break, networking

18:15 - 19:15 - Eric Schabell: 'JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes'

19:15 - 20:00 - Beer, Pizza and Networking

JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes

JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes

A Business Process Management System (BPMS) offers you the capabilities to better manage and streamline your business processes.

JBoss jBPM continues its vision in this area by offering a lightweight process engine for executing business processes, combined with the necessary services and tooling to support business processes in their entire lifecycles. This allows not only developers but also business users to manage your business processes more efficiently.

If you are in the London area on Monday, 17 October, stop by for some jBPM fun! :-)

Update: slides posted here!

JUDCon 2011 in London - Launching into the future with the jBPM MIgration Project

2011-09-13T15:28:00.001+02:00

Today the acceptance mails for JUDCon 2011 in London arrived, this session is a go! Come join us for a good look at launching your processes into the future of jBPM5:

Launching into the future with the jBPM Migration Project
This session will outline the status of our jBPM migration tooling project which has recently been added to the main Drools / jBPM project github repository. We will take a look at the background of jBPM 3 process projects and how we plan to help launch your process projects into the jBPM5 future.

We will start by providing you with a plan for positioning your existing Enterprise jBPM projects for the eventual move towards jBPM5. This will cover the architectural layers involved, a look at the tooling being created for this and steps you can take to ensure a smooth transition moving into your jBPM future.

Finally we will demo the existing tooling on an actual existing enterprise jBPM project. This will provide you with a real life scenario to take home as an example for your own BPM projects.

See you there on Oct 31 - Nov 1! ;-)

Open Source Conference 2011 - technical workshops and sessions on OpenShift, JBoss SOA and jBPM

2011-09-12T15:45:00.000+02:00

We are going to roll out the technical workshops and sessions this year the the Open Source Conference 2011 in Amsterdam on the 9th of December. The following will be the JBoss middleware track, with first the workshop in the morning and the two sessions in the afternoon.

An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your Code into the Cloud

Whether you’re a seasoned Java developer looking to start hacking on
EE6 or you just wrote your first line of Ruby yesterday, the cloud is
turning out to be the perfect environment for developing applications
in just about any modern language or framework. There are plenty of
clouds and platform-as-a-services to choose from, but where to start?
Join us for an action-packed hour of power where we’ll show you how to
deploy an application written in the language of your choice – Java,
Ruby, PHP, Perl or Python, with the framework of your choice – EE6,
CDI, Seam, Spring, Zend, Cake, Rails, Sinatra, PerlDancer or Django to
the OpenShift PaaS in just minutes. And without having to rewrite your
app to get it to work the way the cloud provider thinks your app
should work.

Check the command-line fu as we leverage Git to onboard apps onto
OpenShift Express in seconds, while also making use of the web browser
do the heavy-lifting of provisioning clusters, deploying, monitoring
and auto-scaling apps in OpenShift Flex.

If you want to learn how the OpenShift PaaS and investing an hour of
your time can change everything you thought you knew about developing
applications in the cloud, this session is for you!

Afternoon sessions:

JBoss Brings More Power to your Business Processes

A Business Process Management System (BPMS) offers you the
capabilities to better manage and streamline your business processes.
JBoss jBPM continues its vision in this area by offering a lightweight
process engine for executing business processes, combined with the
necessary services and tooling to support business processes in their
entire lifecycles. This allows not only developers but also business
users to manage your business processes more efficiently.

A lot has happened in the BPM area over the last few years, with the
introduction of the BPMN 2.0 standard, the increasing interest in more
dynamic and adaptive processes, integration with business rules and
event processing, case management, etc. In this session, we will show
you how jBPM5 tackles these challenges, discuss migration to this new
platform and give you an overview of its most important features.

See you there? If not your can follow along on the twitter tag #osc2011. ;-)

JUDCon 2011 London - Submitted OpenShift and jBPM Migration sessions

2011-09-05T10:45:00.000+02:00

The call for papers is still open, so what are you waiting for? ;-)

I have submitted two session for this:

a session on jBPM Migration strategies and the tooling to support it
a session on helping anyone with a laptop to get started with OpenShift, putting your applications in the JBoss Cloud

I will be re-iterating the session I held early this year in Boston at the JBoss World conference, but adding in a demo of the most recent progress on the jBPM Migration tooling which might include some very interesting announcements!

The OpenShift session might even be better categorized as a workshop where if you bring a laptop, you can follow along and have a running JBoss cloudy deployment of your own application in minutes!

See you there! ;-)

JFall 2011: jBPM Migrations - providing a path into the future of BPM

2011-07-13T14:12:00.001+02:00

My submission about the jBPM Migration Project for the NLJUG JFall conference:

jBPM Migrations - providing a path into the future of BPM
This session will outline the status of our jBPM migration tooling project. We will take a look at the background of jBPM 3 process projects and how we plan to help you migrate to jBPM5. We will start by providing you with a plan for positioning your existing Enterprise jBPM projects for the eventual move towards jBPM5. This will cover the architectural layers involved, a look at the tooling being created for this and steps you can take to ensure a smooth transition moving into your jBPM future. Finally we will demo the existing tooling on an actual existing enterprise jBPM projects. This will provide you with real life scenarios to take home as examples for your own BPM projects. The presenters have over 6 years of combined enterprise jBPM experience and have completed award winning BPM projects in the Netherlands. They initiated the jBPM migration tooling project to assist the community with their migration concerns.

See you there in Nijkerk on 2 November 2011?

jBPM Migrations - hints and tips for jBPM3 node conversions (part 2)

2011-06-30T15:10:00.000+02:00

Introduction

In the previous article we discussed the migration strategy as a whole and zoomed in on an initial problem with an event in a start state. In this article we will continue onwards in our exploration of the various concepts that play a role in positioning your existing jBPM projects for migration to BPMN2.

Figure 1: two exit transitions.

In this article we will take you through some of the issues we have encountered in real life jBPM3.2 processes. This will be focused on node implementations that are inventive to say the least, but do not map at all to a BPMN2 process definition.

Down and dirty
When given the freedom to be as creative as only a developer can be, we should not be surprised when a BPM implementation starts to make use of the available constructs that jBPM provides. When we examine the usage of a node, we see a construct such as in Figure 1 (node2) which signifies a single process step. Here we would like to imagine there is a single unit of work being accomplished, like a call to a back-end system, a check of a process variable, etc.

Figure 2: add a decision.

This is all possible within the confines of jBPM, but what we have often seen is the case of Figure 1 (node) which has two exiting transitions. The problem is that the Java implementation handler for this node has taken the liberty to make some decision based on facts present as to which transition will be taken upon exiting node. It might take transition yes or it might take transition no, we can't determine which transition will be taken based on just the process definition.

Figure 3: BPMN2!

When you run the jBPM Migration tool and feed it the process definition from Figure 1, it will not fail to transform this. How is that possible you ask? It was just stated that two exit transitions from the node was not allowed by the BPMN2 specification? Well, we validate all incoming jPDL against the provided XSD and all out-going BPMN2 against the FULL XSD of the BPMN2 specification. Funny enough, when you try to display this in your favorite BPMN2 editor, be that jBPM5 or Eclipse native editors, it will fail to display. This is because most of the editors around now are supporting a sub-class of executables from the BPMN2 specification and not the entire specification.

Figure 4: two incoming transitions

Until these editors either tighten up their implementations or broaden horizons we will need to massage the processes we have created. As you can see in Figure 2, a little bit of analysis shows us that the node needs to be expanded to include a decision for determining if we go with transition yes or transition no.

The final step is what we get when we run this through the jBPM Migration tool and generate a valid BPMN2 process. This can be seen in Figure 3. The nodes have been converted into scriptTasks and the decision was converted into a gateway (diverging).

Incoming transitions

Figure 5: fixed two input transitions.

Taking a look at the input side of our nodes, we can see that with a single incoming transition we have no problems with either validating, converting or displaying BPMN2. What would happen if we had a situation where there was a process defined such that node2 has two incoming transitions? This is shown in Figure 4 and any attempts to convert will again be processed by the jBPM Migration tool without problems as it validates against the full BPMN2 specification.

It is not really a very well defined BPM process and we should clean this up so that there are three distinct paths. This is a good idea because you can then supply accurate management information on which path through the process was taken. Look at Figure 5, you will find there are now end states for all three paths you take through the process. This allows us to report to our management how many yes paths, how many no paths and how many maybe paths were taken through this process. The final full BPMN2 process after conversion by the jBPM Migration tool is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: final BPMN2 process.

What's next?
Stay tuned for more, we plan to supply a series of articles that zoom into specific elements that you will find problematic in a process. We have covered start-state and nodes so far. We still have to look at end-states, states, transitions, decisions and much more.

jBPM Migrations - hints and tips part 1

2011-06-19T12:17:00.002+02:00

Introduction
Since we have started the jBPM Migration project I have been getting more and more inquiries as to how best prepare a jBPM3.2.x process for future migration to jBPM5. These questions have no easy answers, though I have tried to help you 'Get your BPM Ducks in a Row' at JUDCon last year in Berlin and again with more follow up at JUDCon in Boston.

With the last release of jBPM Migration Project (v0.8) we have reached a point of providing a fully runnable CLI Java jar component that eventually migrate your existing jBPM3 process definitions to jBPM5 in the BPMN2 format. This means it is now time to start thinking about what you can do to make the migration process as painless as possible.

In this first installment we will kickoff the discussion about migrations with a look at the process definition in jBPM3. We will discuss the background of jPDL and what this allows you to get away with in your process modeling. This article will conclude with a look at some issues you can encounter at the top level of your jBPM3 process definition.

jPDL gave us freedom
With jBPM3 you get a non-standard XML Java Process Definition Language (jPDL), which is not a bad thing as up to the acceptance of the BPMN2 standard everyone was left to sort out their design languages themselves. This jPDL is a simple and easily understood language that Java developers can very quickly understand and it comes with an XSD to allow for validation.

A down side to this jPDL is that you can do quite a bit of down and dirty work underneath the process definition layer (as I discussed previously, there are various layers in our jBPM projects) in your Java handler code. With the introduction of BPMN2 we now have a specification and standard that describes a more proper way of modeling and executing your BPM processes.

This new standard with it's requirements for modeling has shown us that when we as process developers are given the jPDL freedom to model as we see fit, we tend to come up with very innovative solutions to say the least! Trying to map these innovative solutions has shown that with a bit of thought and attention you can position you existing processes to easily migration to the future with BPMN2.

So let's get started with a look at the highest level of your process definitions. Here you should find something like listed here:


    < ## rest of the process definition. ## />

Up to now, I have been receiving process definitions from customers, partners and interested community members. I am amazed at the amount of process definitions that have either a missing xmlns attribute or it is not filled in with a version. As you can see above, to use our migration tooling we validate all incoming jPDL against its XSD. Make sure your process definition matches the toolings version!

If we take a look at how processes are started in jPDL, you might have decided it was a good idea to use the event element in a start-state like the following code shows:


   
    
      
        
      
 
      
    

    < ## rest of the process definition. ## />

Within BPMN2 it is not allowed to have an action take place in a start node. We are able to convert this by extending your process definition to include a Java Node (domain specific node extension to BPMN2) which we insert after the start-state. This allows us to execute the Java code you have in the MyHandler class before we move on to the firstNode. You can see the results in figure 1.

Figure 1: extra Java Node added.

This might not be an acceptable solution for your processes. In that case you will need to re-factor your process definitions to move the action to a separate node. This example clearly illustrates one of the many differences in how the jBPM3 modeling language allows you to accomplish an item of work in your process without clearly modeling it in your process definition. We will show more examples as we proceed through this series of articles.

This concludes our initial introduction to jBPM Migrations where we provided you with some hints and tips to help you start preparing your processes for migration to BPMN2 and jBPM5.

What's next?
Stay tuned for more, we plan to supply a series of articles that zoom into specific elements that you will find problematic in a process. We will look at start-states, end-states, nodes, states, transitions, decisions and much more.