By shortening the gap between Business Users and the IT Department, business processes help us to define in a declarative way how systems and people will collaborate to achieve meaningful goals.

This chapter is about why Drools and jBPM were designed together and how they can be used together. First, we will start with a short introduction about what jBPM is followed by a quick example. In the second half of the chapter, we will discuss more technical aspects of the Rules and Process engine integrations, such as how to start a business process from a Rule, how to use a rule from inside a process instance, persistence and transaction configurations for long-running business processes, and so on.

Other good books have already been published about jBPM 6, so you can consider this chapter as an introduction to jBPM plus a set of pointers and references that will get you started with this framework.

This chapter will cover the following topics: