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)

Build the prototype


With the process engine of our BPM system now in place, it's time to turn our attention to the user interface that our users will interact with, as they execute the process. We will make this available over the internet as a series of web screens that the user can use like a regular website: the jBPM project refers to this as the "web console". For the time being, we will build the web console on our local machine, where we'll be able to play around with it until we are happy.

In the next chapter, we'll see how we can deploy it on a server, so our proof-of-concept users can test the system properly.

The web console is a combination of task lists, which represent the queue of work that a user or a group of users has to do, and task forms, which are the screens where the user can actually complete the tasks that have been assigned to them. As we'll see later in the chapter, the jBPM web console also comes with some other handy utilities out of the box, although most of these...