Business Process Management (BPM), in general, is not something you learn overnight. I personally consider it more like learning a new language, where you first have to spend some time getting familiar with the basics and gradually extend your vocabulary. Learning or staying up-to-date with some of the latest technology changes has never been easy. It might not always be easy to find a good overview, detailed information on the web, or examples that explain the concepts in detail. A book like this definitely helps a lot by starting with the basics and gradually diving more into the details.

The jBPM project—while it might have started as a simple, open source workflow engine—has grown significantly over the last few years. jBPM uses a lot of the same approaches and provides solutions similar to the way other BPM vendors are applying the BPM methodology. With the arrival of the BPMN 2.0 specification, which is being supported by many different vendors nowadays, there is even a (business user friendly) language for defining business processes that is shared across vendors. So, there is a huge amount of generic BPM knowledge for you to learn. But jBPM also has its own key characteristics (for example, how it integrates business processes with business rules and complex event processing in a unique way), and only on learning these will you be able to access the full power of the project.

I have known Mauricio and Esteban for quite a few years now, as they have been working in the jBPM and Drools community for a long time already. I met them a few times over the years, and recently had the privilege of being able to hire Mauricio as part of the core team. He's very enthusiastic, and combines this with a deep technical knowledge of all the internal details, which makes him one of the best evangelists in our project. For that reason, he received two JBoss Recognition Awards for his work on new features and bug fixing for the jBPM project in 2011. Esteban received a similar one in 2012 for his work on new features.

Mauricio and Esteban have done a great job in this book in starting from the basics; by first introducing BPM as a discipline, exploring the details on how to then start modeling your first few processes while learning the language, and then going deeper into specific features and tools that are built around that. Some of the chapters go into a lot of detail on specific components (for example, human task management), so there is a lot of information for those who are looking for some of these details as well.

Without a doubt, the authors have deep technical knowledge of all the internal technical details of the project. I believe they have made a great mix of first explaining some of the concepts in an abstract way and then jumping into details with real code and by using realistic examples. The emergency service example and many others had already made Mauricio famous in the jBPM community, before he joined the project full-time.

So I hope this book will help you in getting a better understanding of the concepts behind the jBPM project, although this might require a second read of some of the chapters, as is stated in the first chapter. But I believe it will also provide you with some of the answers when you're deep into the coding already and are looking for that example on exactly how to do that one thing you've been fighting with for several hours.

Kris Verlaenen

jBPM Project Lead

JBoss, by Red Hat