This stage will (hopefully) drive your architecture and integration strategies. Standard specifications are created to define a common baseline to be shared and applied in new developments, which is based on the collaboration and experience of many groups and companies to aid in integration with other systems. If you decide to change implementations, standards could help you a lot in not having to rework migrations from one implementation to another.

This book introduces two main standards specifications, Business Process Model and Notation Version 2.0 (BPMN 2.0) and the Web Service Human Task specification. Both are used by jBPM6 and reflect good practices to create industry accepted and interoperable applications.

We won't go into the full details of the specifications in this book. We'll cover the details regarding where jBPM6 is not 100 percent compliant with the standard specification and how to deal with those cases. The standard specifications are not included for being size restrictive. Reading them, however, is very good to gain perspective on common practices adopted in a wide range of industries. We will provide links to them as we dive into them.