JBoss BPMS Success Stories (and other fairytales)

This year's EclipseCon Europe was held, as always, in Ludwigsburg Germany. Featured for the first time this year at the Ludwigsburg event was the UnConference - essentially a collection of presentations and discussions targeted at Eclipse Working Groups. Of course the SOA project was well represented at BPM Day with several interesting talks by Marc Gille, Adrian Mos, Priska Buri, Gregor Gisler, Rodrigue Le Gall and, of course, yours truly.

My presentation begins with a short overview of BPM Suite, and how it was used to meet real life challenges in different vertical markets. I conclude with a preview of what's new in jBPM version 6 and what's on the horizon for JBoss middleware technologies. The presentation is called “Customer Success Stories and other fairytales” because when I asked our Solution Architects to share some of their success stories, they agreed under the conditions that I not mention certain of our customers’ names, and I was not allowed to present any details of their internal business processes.

Bpms ecu2014 from Bob Brodt

Adrian's presentation, "From Domain Specific Process Design and Back" was particularly interesting to me. The premise is that the people that are most familiar with how their business is run, are typically not familiar with the technology required to automate their business processes, and will need to turn to an external group (or their internal IT department) for help. The technologist must first learn the language of the business through a series of meetings with the various stakeholders. These kinds of discussions usually involve whiteboard drawings, with boxes and circles and arrows. Eventually a kind of graphical language evolves, which captures the artifacts, resources and participants in the business workflow. The question then becomes: how can we accurately translate the semantics of this domain-specific graphical language, to the language of the BPM execution engine?

Fortunately, all of the tools required to do this are already available in the open source community. In his presentation, Adrian points out that a graphical editor capable of creating drawings that capture the semantic in the domain language, can be created in a matter of minutes using Sirius. The output from this editor is a text file that conforms to a Domain Specific Language (DSL) grammar which is easily defined by XText. This DSL can then be translated to BPMN2 (or any other execution language for that matter) using Mangrove. This completes the one-way translation from the graphical DSL to an executable language. The problem Adrian is still working on is the reverse translation from executable to DSL. While not a trivial problem, it should (theoretically) be possible to complete this round-trip, thus bridging the language gap.

From Domain-Specific Process Design to Execution and Back from Adrian Mos

Every year, Bonitasoft sponsors a one week long "think outside the box" event, where employees are asked to brainstorm ideas about which they are most passionate. Rodrigue Le Gall's presentation, "The BPM of Things" was a play on the "Internet of Things", or IoT, which also happened to be the hot-button topic of this year's EclipseCon event. Rodrigue predicted that in the year 2020, the number of connected, or "smart" objects, would exceed 80 Billion - nearly 9 times more than the number of smart phones in use on the planet. With all these smart devices on the planet, facilitating communications between them, and coordinating their individual or group behaviors could become problematic.

Rodrigue envisions the use of a BPM engine to orchestrate the interactions of these devices. As a proof of concept, he devised a "shared locker" - essentially a publicly accessible depot for exchanging physical goods or information (think of a public locker you might find in a train station or bus terminal.) The actual hardware bits included a Raspbery PI and some blinky lights to simulate the locking mechanism.

If you're interested in implementation details and motivation behind this very interesting topic, please have a look at the slide deck of Rodrigue's presentation:

Bpm of things or how to from rlg

Community interest in the Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler is growing steadily, and Gregor Gisler and the IT-Pearls team have made a significant contribution in the form of an extension plug-in that customizes the editor for Eclipse Stardust.This plugin has been on my list of things to do on a rainy weekend for quite a while now, but alas, I live in Colorado where we have an average of 300 days of sunshine per year ;)

Thanks Gregor, Stephan and especially Simon (who, as I understand it, did most of the heavy lifting.)

EclipseCon BPM Day Ludwigsburg - Roundtrip Modelling with Eclipse Stardust from IT-Pearls AG

The Missing BPMN2 Modeler screencasts

 Hi folks!

Several of you have been asking "what happened to the screencast videos on the Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler project website?" To be honest, I don't know what happened. I know they are still there, but for some reason they won't play anymore. Maybe it has to do with a recent upgrade to Flash player, maybe it's aliens from outer space...who knows?

Until I can get a chance to re-record these (and update them for the latest version) I've made them available here:

Setup
Simple Process
Connection Router Feature
Custom Task Example - Part 1
Custom Task Example - Part 2

Sorry if these are bit fuzzy, but if you resize your browser just right, they should be legible.

Enjoy :)

Bob

Stealth Computers

Bookputer

Remember back in grade school when you were the first person in history, ever, to come up with the idea of hollowing out a book to hide your Playboy magazines so Mom wouldn't find them? The concept still applies today, but now you have to hide your PC in a hollow book so Mom won't find all those porn websites you've been surfing.

Beerputer

I like beer. I like computers. Hey! Why not combine them???

Steampunkputer

Here's my steampunk inspired creation; an intel Core i7 with a really fast SSD and two GEFORCE display cards running 4 monitors.

Pigputer

Also known as "Hamilton" (get it? Hamilton? HAM-ilton?) this fiberglass piggy-bank is a great conversation starter. Just don't try to stuff coins in there - they will cause Hamilton to spew sparks and release the magic black smoke.

BPMN 2.0 Diagram Types

Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler and Diagram Types

As a software developer involved in implementing a BPM system for your organization or for a customer you're probably focused mainly on defining user roles, work activities, process flow logic, exception handling, making sure all of the data structures are properly defined and all of the endpoints are correct, and yadda yadda yadda. Sometimes it feels like you're too close to the trees to see the forest.

The smart folks that make up the OMG understand that business processes can be extremely complex and that no one type of diagram can capture all of the details required to fully understand the inner workings of a large enterprise, much less how one organization interacts with others in the business world. That's why the BPMN 2.0 specification defines several types of diagrams, which present different views of a business process. Today I'll discuss these diagram types and how they're intended to be used.

Process Diagrams

This is the "boxes and arrows" flow chart type of diagram that defines the activities ("boxes") their sequencing ("arrows"), decision branches ("diamonds") and so on. This type of diagram typically represents an Organization's private process, i.e. a description of how an Organization works internally. While the diagram may show information (in the form of "messages") coming in from, or leaving the Organization to the outside world, this type of diagram is not intended to show interactions between different Organizations.

It's also possible to describe two or more departments interacting with each other inside the Organization using "swim lanes". Swim lanes can be nested to reflect the Organization's departmental hierarchy and individual roles within a department. Here's an example showing the product development cycle in a software consulting firm:

Collaboration Diagrams

This type of diagram shows the interactions between two or more processes, typically owned by different parties or Organizations. The processes are represented by "Pools" and, as with Process Diagrams, each Pool may contain one or more Lanes. Collaboration Diagrams are similar to Process Diagrams in that they depict the flow of activities internal to an Organization; the difference is whereas a Process Diagram is used to depict a single process, Collaboration Diagrams show multiple processes as well as the interface points between them.

Here's a Collaboration Diagram illustrating a Pizza order:

Choreography Diagrams

Choreography Diagrams are mainly focused on the participants ("Pools") in a business process and the information exchanged between them, rather than on the orchestration of the work being performed. A Choreography Diagram can be thought of as a business contract between two or more Organizations.

Here's a Choreography Diagram showing the interaction between a buyer and an online retailer. Each exchange is represented by a rounded rectangle, called a Choreography Task; the information exchanged between them is shown as an envelope representing a message sent from the initiating participant.

Conversation Diagrams

These are a simplification of a Choreography Diagram and are intended as an overview to illustrate which participants co-operate on which tasks. Conversations, as you would guess, are exchanges of packets of information ("Messages") related to the completion of a task.

In Conversation Diagrams, the participants are represented as Pools, similar to the Collaboration Diagram, and the information exchange (Conversation) as a hexagon connecting them, as shown here:

Conversation Diagrams are not yet fully supported by the Eclipse BPMN2 Modeler, but they are planned as an enhancement for a future release. Please visit the project website for more information about the BPMN2 Modeler.