Chapter 1, Why Do We Need Business Process Management?, introduces the BPM discipline. This chapter will provide the basis for the rest of the book, by providing an understanding of why and how the jBPM6 project has been designed, and the path its evolution will follow.

Chapter 2, BPM Systems' Structure, explores what the main pieces and components inside a Business Process Management system are, in depth. This chapter introduces the concept of BPM system as the natural follow-up of an understanding of the BPM discipline. The reader will find a deep and technical explanation about how a BPM system core can be built from scratch and how it will interact with the rest of the components in the BPM system infrastructure. This chapter also describes the intimate relationship between the Drools and jBPM projects, which is one of the key advantages of jBPM6 in comparison with all the other BPM systems, as well as existing methodologies where a BPM system connects with other systems.

Chapter 3, Using BPMN 2.0 to Model Business Scenarios, covers the main constructs used to model our business processes, guiding you through an example that illustrates the most useful modeling patterns. The BPMN 2.0 specification has become the de facto standard for modeling executable business processes since it was released in early 2011, and is recommended to any BPM implementation, even outside the scope of jBPM6.

Chapter 4, Understanding the KIE Workbench, takes a look into the tooling provided by the jBPM6 project, which will enable you to both define new processes and configure a runtime to execute those processes. The overall architecture of the tooling provided will be covered in this chapter as well.

Chapter 5, Creating a Process Project in the KIE Workbench, dives into the required steps to create a process definition with the existing tooling, as well as to test it and run it. The BPMN 2.0 specification will be put into practice as you create an executable process and a compiled project where the runtime specifications will be defined.

Chapter 6, Human Interactions, covers the Human task component inside jBPM6, in depth. A big feature of the BPM system is the capability to coordinate human and system interactions. It also describes how the existing tooling builds a user interface using the concepts of task lists and task forms, exposing the end users involved in the execution of human tasks, coming from multiple process definitions, to a common interface.

Chapter 7, Defining Your Environment with the Runtime Manager, covers the different strategies provided to configure an environment to run our processes. You will explore the configurations for connecting external systems, Human task components, persistence strategies and the relation a specific process execution will have with an environment, as well as methods to define their own custom runtime configuration.

Chapter 8, Implementing Persistence and Transactions, covers the shared mechanisms between the Drools and jBPM projects used to store information and define transaction boundaries. When we want to support processes that coordinate systems and people over long periods of time, we need to understand how the process information can be persisted.

Chapter 9, Integration with Other Knowledge Definitions, gives a brief introduction to the Drools rule engine. It is used to mix business processes with business rules, to define advanced and complex scenarios. We also cover Drools Fusion, and an added feature of the Drools rule engine to add the ability of temporal reasoning, allowing business processes to be monitored, improved, and covered by business scenarios that require temporal inferences.

Chapter 10, Integrating KIE Workbench with External Systems, describes the ways in which the provided tooling can be extended with extra features, along with a description of all the different extension points provided by the API and exposed by the tooling. A set of good practices is described in order to give you a comprehensive way to deal with different scenarios a BPMS will likely face.

Appendix, The UberFire Framework, goes into detail about the based utility framework used by the KIE Workbench to define its user interface. You will learn the structure and use of the framework, along with a demonstration that will enable the extension of any component in the workbench distribution you choose.

This is a developer guide, so the thing you will find most useful when you read this book is a computer beside you, where you can try the examples and open, compile, and test the provided projects. The main idea behind the book is to get you up to speed in the development of applications or tooling that use jBPM6, and for this reason the book spends a lot of time with code examples and unit tests to run.

Good programming skills are required to easily understand the examples presented in this book. Most of the chapters complement the covered topics with a set of executable Maven projects. A basic understanding of Maven, Java, and JUnit is required.

This book is intended for Java developers and architects who want to start developing applications using jBPM6, as well as start working on top of the provided tooling, either using or extending it. jBPM6 is a very flexible framework, but with this flexibility comes architectural and design decisions that we need to make when we start using it. This book offers a complete reference to all of the components distributed with jBPM 6.1.0.Beta3 community version, and it can be used as reference material to guide a team of developers in building efficient solutions using business processes and other knowledge definitions such as business rules and complex event processing.

After reading this book, you will have a good understanding of the jBPM6 architecture and components. jBPM6 is a Red Hat's lead open source community project and is fully supported through JBoss BPMS product. If you are interested in the BPMS product, you can find more details at http://www.redhat.com/products/jbossenterprisemiddleware/business-process/.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You can also run the server using the same command line by typing mvn exec:exec once the installation is done."

A block of code is set as follows:

public class RuleFlowProcessInstance implements ProcessInstance {
  public RuleFlowProcess getRuleFlowProcess() { ... }
  public int getState() { ... }
  public void setVariable(String name, Object value) { ... }
  public Collection<NodeInstance> getNodeInstances() { ... }
  public Object getVariable(String name) { ... }
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

TaskService taskService = HumanTaskServiceFactory.
        newTaskServiceConfigurator().
        entityManagerFactory(emf).
        userGroupCallback(ugCallback).
        interceptor(priority, new UserLogInterceptor()).
        getTaskService();

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

bin/standalone.sh --server-config=standalone-full.xml

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Once the Finish button is clicked on, we're directed to the project editor, where we can configure dependencies, KIE bases, KIE sessions, and all the project-relevant components."

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