Book Image

Alfresco Developer Guide

Book Image

Alfresco Developer Guide

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Alfresco Developer Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Creating Process Definitions


JBoss jBPM is an open source, standalone workflow engine. OK, it is more than just a standalone workflow engine. JBoss rightly calls jBPM a "platform for graph-based execution languages". Workflow is one of several different domains that can be addressed with a graph-based execution language, but it is the only one this book concerns itself with.

The jBPM engine is responsible for managing deployed processes, instantiating and executing processes, persisting process state and metadata to a relational database (via Hibernate), and tracking task assignment and task lists.

jBPM is built on the idea that any process can be described as a graph or a set of connected nodes. Workflows are described with "process definitions" using an XML-based language called Java Process Definition Language (jPDL). jPDL is one example of a graph-based execution language. Others include BPEL for service orchestration and SEAM pageflow.

In jPDL, each node represents a step in a workflow...