Thursday, November 12, 2015

Process-driven applications at Devoxx 2015

I just finished my presentation at Devoxx this year, on process-driven applications.  The conference is a lot of fun, with a big Red Hat presence, talking about JBoss Middleware, OpenShift, Red Hat Developer program and a lot more.



It wasn't the regular presentation where we try to showcase all capabilities and list all the features of our project (as most people probably have seen one of those at some point already), but I wanted to focus on something special instead.

The project has evolved significantly in the last few years, and I believe we have now reached a point where we have a lot of building blocks in place to help you develop your application.

Rather than focusing on the technology, process-driven application development starts from a different goal, i.e. building something customized to what you need. By taking advantage of the workbench, you can build and execute your processes as usual, but rather than relying on the generic tooling we provide, you have access to all data and features we offer out-of-the-box, but combine them in a customized way.

In the demo, I built out a small expenses process, and a custom screen (using AngularJS) that can list my current expenses and create new ones just the way I want to.  You can even add some small dashboards to keep track of the number of open expense reports or a quick overview of how many expense reports you submitted in the last year and when.

I also showed how to support more flexible and adaptive cases, where you want to give the end user the capability to make decisions or to dynamically add new tasks (all the way to the extreme where you don't define anything upfront but start a new ad-hoc case).  And obviously you can combine both, creating a custom application to drive your patient cases:

(click to enlarge)

My slides are available here.  The presentation itself was recorded and is available (for free) as well: