3.8. Deploying Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite Artifacts to Red Hat JBoss Fuse

Red Hat JBoss Fuse is an open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with an elastic footprint and is based on Apache Karaf. The 6.1 version of Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite supports deployment of runtime artifacts to Fuse.
With the 6.1 release, JBoss BPM Suite runtime components (in the form of JARs) are OSGi enabled. The runtime engines JARs MANIFEST.MF files describe their dependencies, amongst other things. You can plug these JARs directly into an OSGi environment, like Fuse.

Warning

JBoss BPM Suite uses a scanner to enable continuous integration and resolution/fetching of artifacts from remote Maven repositories. This scanner, called KIE-CI, uses a native Maven parser called Plexus to parse Maven POMs. However, this parser is not OSGi compatible and fails to instantiate in an OSGi environment. KIE-CI automatically switches to a simpler POM parser called MinimalPomParser.
The MinimalPomParser is a very simple POM parser implementation provided by Drools and is limited in what it can parse. It ignores some POM file parts, like a kJAR's parent POM. This means that users must not rely on those POM features (such as dependencies declared in parent POM in their kJARs) when using KIE-CI in OSGi environment.

Separating assets and code

One of the main advantage of deploying JBoss BPM Suite artifacts on Fuse is that each bundle is isolated, running in its own classloader. This allows you to separate the logic (code) from the assets. Business users can produce and change the rules and processes (assets) and package them in their own bundle, keeping them separate from the project bundle (code), created by the developer team. Assets can be updated without needing to change the project code.