Friday, April 16, 2010

Announcing jBPM 5

Over the last few years, we have accumulated a lot of knowledge and experience in various BPM-related projects here at JBoss, and in an effort to consolidate that, we would like to combine our efforts in what will be the next generation BPM platform, called jBPM 5.

jBPM 5 will be based on the combined experience of jBPM and Drools Flow (and related projects like RiftSaw and Overlord), and will bring together the benefits of both solutions (and much more). As part of this process, we would like to ask you, our community, for feedback and assistance on this.

The architecture of jBPM 5 builds on the experience that was built up over the past few years based on our customer feedback as well as strong community involvement. It will continue the vision of all of the constituent projects, so large parts of the architecture that we are presenting here will probably not come as a surprise to you, either because it already exists in a current project or because it has been on the roadmap for quite some time (BPMN2 for example).

Nevertheless, wide feedback is very important to us, and we have therefore constructed a Request for Comments document which describes (what we believe could be) the new architecture of jBPM 5. Not only this includes an overview of the most important components, but also some of the key characteristics. We will roll out a roadmap for jBPM 5 based on this architecture and the received comments.

Now is the time for the community that has helped shape these projects so well in the past to do so again. We will welcome any feedback to this proposal, either by sending an email to the  jbpm-dev mailing list or by adding a comment to the request document directly. If you would like to subscribe to the jbpm-dev mailing list or browse the archive, please visit the list information page.