Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Overview of this book

JBoss jBPM is a free, open-source, business process management solution. It enables users to create business processes that coordinate people, applications, and services. A business process is a sequence of activities triggered by a certain input that results in a valuable output. Business Process Management is about analyzing those activities in a structured way and eventually supporting their execution with a workflow application. This allows for the following results: Better management visibility of their business: improved decision making Low cost of inputs: de-skilled labor requirements, less waste, standardized components Better outputs: consistent quality, more customer satisfaction Businesses have always tried to manage their processes, but software such as jBPM brings the methodology and management theory to practical life. JBoss jBPM offers the following key features: Graphical process definition Flexibility to integrate code into the graphical process definition A customizable web-based workflow application that runs the process you’ve defined Easy programming model to extend the graphical process definition A process-oriented programming model (jPDL) that blends the best of process definition languages and Java. Easy to integrate with other systems through the JBoss middleware suite.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Chapter 4. The Prototype user interface

It's all very well having a beautiful process definition, but this is "business process management", not "business process definition". Having a process definition that accurately reflects the way the business works is only half the story. In this chapter, we'll add the majority of the remaining half. The final icing on the cake will be added in the last few chapters.

In this chapter, we are going to build the end user part of our BPM system. We will put together the user interface, which our proof-of-concept testers will use to interact with the process definition that we created in the previous chapter. By the end of the chapter, we will have obtained sign-off from our sponsors and the proof-of-concept testers indicating that they are happy that this user interface is ready to test. In the next chapter, we'll run our testing to prove that our BPM concept system will indeed meet Bland Records' requirements and should be further developed.

In this chapter...