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.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

jBPM Continuous Integration Reports Now Publicly Available

Thanks to the restless Quality Engineering team at JBoss, the continuous integration reports for select projects are available to the public. Here is the most recent token of the company's long-standing tradition of openness and freedom. Not only is the jBPM source code open, but also the development forum, version control system, issue tracker, binary repository and now even the continuous builds. jBPM bares all!

The jbpm3 jobs form a matrix with three axes: jdk, container and database. The jdk and container axes are merged together in order to cover the most ground with the least configurations.
jdk container
sun 1.4.2 jboss 4.0.5
sun 1.5.0 jboss 4.2.3
sun 1.6.0 jboss 5.0.1

The database axis is arranged as a vector to allow for parallel testing; each jdk-appserver couple is executed against each configured database. This organization is quite effective: each job takes only 25-30 min to run.

Hope this new stream of information will tickle your curiosity about the engineering aspects of the project.