Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Overview of this book

JBoss jBPM is a free, open-source, business process management solution. It enables users to create business processes that coordinate people, applications, and services. A business process is a sequence of activities triggered by a certain input that results in a valuable output. Business Process Management is about analyzing those activities in a structured way and eventually supporting their execution with a workflow application. This allows for the following results: Better management visibility of their business: improved decision making Low cost of inputs: de-skilled labor requirements, less waste, standardized components Better outputs: consistent quality, more customer satisfaction Businesses have always tried to manage their processes, but software such as jBPM brings the methodology and management theory to practical life. JBoss jBPM offers the following key features: Graphical process definition Flexibility to integrate code into the graphical process definition A customizable web-based workflow application that runs the process you’ve defined Easy programming model to extend the graphical process definition A process-oriented programming model (jPDL) that blends the best of process definition languages and Java. Easy to integrate with other systems through the JBoss middleware suite.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Building our example process


It is finally time to put these concepts into practice: let's start building our example process. We will go through building the "Produce music products" process in detail in this chapter: for now, we will simply concentrate on getting the process into the tool. We will worry about adding more interesting complexity at a later stage, once we have the bare bones sorted out. We are at the proof-of-concept stage after all, so there is little point in wasting time on nice to haves.

As a reminder of our To Be process, which we are going to build in the tool, let's have a look at the activity flow diagram that we built in the previous chapter:

Open up the jBPM Designer, click File | New project, expand the JBoss jBPM node, and select Process Project. We'll call the project "Bland Records". On the final screen of the project creation wizard, pull down the drop-down box and select JBoss jBPM 3.2 as the core jBPM location. Click Finish. In the Package Explorer, navigate...