Car Insurance Policy Quote demo

The Red Hat UK SA team has been working at a demonstration that shows how different Red Hat projects can be brought together to form one big solution.  As part of this, they created a demo that shows a Car Insurance Policy Quote process:

It asks the user for input (driver information and car information and does various calculations in between to calculate the policy risk and price, using a decision table.  It is using JBoss BRMS 5.3.1 (which includes support for jBPM5) on top of EAP6.

Derek created a small video showing this in action as well:

The sources can be found here. Eric Schabell also extracted the policy quote process and packaged it inside his demo framework here.

Enjoy!

jBPM 6.0 Beta2 available

For developers that want to have a sneak peak at what's coming in jBPM 6.0, we've just released jBPM 6.0.0.Beta2.  We've added several large improvements:

• jbpm-console, our web-based management console (where you can start new process instances, complete your task list, etc.) has been redesigned completely


• new task UI

• new process instance management UI
  
  
  
• one web application that combines the entire life cycle (process modeling, deployment, execution and monitoring) into one web application
  
• based on UberFire, which provides a configurable and pluggable workspace

• RuntimeManager allows you to easily get access to a ksession and/or task service without needing to worry about how to create the session, where to find it, how to link it to the task service, etc.  There are predefined strategies for:
• singleton: one singleton session is used to execute all requests
• session per request: a new session is used for each request (and destroyed afterwards)
• session per process instance: each process instance has its own session context, all commands for that process instance are automatically executed in that context
  
  
• jbpm-services: core engine exposed as a service that can be deployed in a clustered environment, with lots of smaller improvements as well:
• timer service that will be able to handle timers in a clustered environment and automatically restore the appropriate sessions if timers need to be fired
• instead of using the process instance id as the unique identifier of one specific process instance, you can also correlate with your own business key now
• history logging has been extended to log additional information and an asychronous logger (using JMS) is available as well
• all services are exposed using CDI
• ! Note that remoting capabilities using REST / JMS are currently not available yet in Beta2 but will be available soon

• The Guvnor repository has been refactored:
• The repository back-end is implemented using a Virtual File System (VFS) with a git back-end as the default implementation.  This allows you to connect to your repository taking advantage of all the features that GIT provides out-of-the-box.
• The repository now uses maven to build all the processes, rules, models, forms etc. in your projects and produces kjars (knowledge jars).  These kjars can be treated as normal maven dependencies in your projects and the repository exposes itself as a maven repository as well.

• A Dashboard web application can be used to monitor your system and generate meaningful reports.  Some default reports are available out-of-the-box (showing information about running process instances, outstanding tasks, etc.), but the tool can also be used to combine those with your own business datam create your own KPIs and customized reports.
  


• Improved exception handling when performing service tasks, where the process that requested the service could be notified using a combination of techniques, including boundary events, event sub-processes, intermediate events, etc.
  
• The new Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler replaced the old BPMN2 editor and has been extended to support a lot more constructs.  Designer has been updated accordingly as well.

• Designer now supports the BPSim 1.0 specification for simulating your processes.

You can download the installer from here and follow the installer documentation and screencasts (below) to get your first processes running, both in Eclipse (for developers and in the web (for business analysts or even end users as well).

Note that this is a beta release, so unfortunately, most of the documentation is still missing, and there probably are some rough edges and/or bugs in there.  But do give it a try and let us know, so we can try to still improve these.

Google Summer of Code 2013

JBoss is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2013 program, which means that students can work on their favourite open-source project during the summer and get ultimate glory and a nice paycheck in return.

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. We have worked with the open source community to identify and fund exciting projects for the upcoming summer.

JBoss has created a list of possible ideas you can take a look at, but you can always propose us your own ideas as well !

For jBPM, we've added two ideas to the list, but there is a Wiki page with over 10 possible proposals available here, including:

• jBPM on android
• Integrating jBPM with your own preferred project(s)
• jBPM performance on steroids
• Document management system
• Mobile client(s) for jBPM
• From BPEL to BPMN2
• Social BPM using jBPM
• Process mining for jBPM
• jBPM and Drools for access control
• jBPM and Drools for clinical decision support

The deadline for student applications is May 3rd, 19:00 UTC, so if you're interested but didn't submit anything yet, you'll need to be fast!

BPSim and jBPM

jBPM has been an early adopter, supporter, and implementer of the Business Process Simulation Interchange Standard (BPSim). We believe that BPSim (which is a WfMC standard) will create a wide adoption of business process simulation in the BPM community, and are very happy to be part of that effort.

With the BPSim version 1.0 recently released, we have updated our jBPM core engine, simulation engine (which is based on the core engine) and our web-based tooling (jBPM Designer) to this latest version of the specification.

If you are interested in learning more about BPSim and jBPM or just have any questions feel free to talk to us on our IRC channels.

Here is the link to the jBPM Designer business process simulation capabilities that Tihomir posted before. We are adding new features and usability enhancements to it that should be out soon, so stay tuned.

SOA Governance workflow in S-RAMP

Governance (of all your artefacts) in a SOA environment is critical, and the Overlord project is an umbrella project that aims to bring governance to the JBoss SOA Platform and beyond.

The S-RAMP project is one of those puzzle pieces.  It is a SOA repository, based on the "SOA Repository Artifact Model and Protocol" (S-RAMP) TC for storing and managing SOA artefacts.

The 0.1.1 release of the S-RAMP project adds governance workflow capabities, where they use a BPMN2 process and jBPM to define and execute the business logic related to governing these artefacts.

They included a demo of all of this in action, so if you're interested, go check it out!

Book: jBPM5 Developer Guide

Mauricio and Esteban have been working hard on their latest book on jBPM and today, their jBPM5 Developer Guide has been released !

I believe Mauricio and Esteban have done a good job in including  a lot of valuable information for people with different backgrounds.  They start with an introduction to BPM in general, give an overview of how to model processes using the BPMN 2.0 standard, show how to do all of this with jBPM and then go even further by showing more complex examples that for example include business rule integration, etc.

You can get both as a eBook or printed (which includes a free eBook as well) from Packt Publishing here.

I'm even able to offer you some discount codes, 20% off for the printed version and 25% off for the eBook.  I think that's a very nice gesture of Packt Publishing, showing once more they try to support open-source with benefits like this.  Note that they have a limited validity for use till 1st Feb, 2013.

Here are the discount codes:

Print books - ProjectjBPM_20%offPrintbook
eBooks - ProjectjBPM_25%offeBook

In order to apply the codes, you will need to:
- Visit the Packt website and log in to your account (non-registered users will be required to create an account first)
- Open the book-page and add the book to cart
- On the cart check-out page, enter code in the Enter promotional code box and then Update cart

JBug London - December 12

Mauricio and Esteban are doing a presentation on jBPM and the book they wrote about it on a London JBug in December 12!

While the first part will mostly focus on the core BPM features, the second part will also show some of the more advanced integration with business rules and complex event processing.

So if you're in London on December 12th, and looking for an interesting presentation or talk afterwards about jBPM, or just looking for a place to eat some pizza and drink some beer ;), register now !

There's even a chance to win a copy of the new book already !