The first part of this section covers how to integrate jBPM acting as a client into external services; Chapter 5, BPMN Constructs, and Chapter 6, Core Architecture, introduced jBPM elements specifically designed to call external web services from a process definition: the service task and the WS or the REST workitem handlers. The latter are jBPM ready-to-use, configurable components, but keep in mind that jBPM gives the user all the tools to develop custom handlers so as to perform interactions with generic external services (see Chapter 7, Customizing and Extending jBPM). The second part of the section will examine how to integrate the jBPM API as a server using REST, SOAP, and JMS. We will provide you with two example projects (jbpm-remote-client and jbpm-remote-server) in order to put into action these jBPM features.

We are going to see how to connect to both REST and SOAP services.