Chapter 10. Getting Started with Processes

JBoss Business Process Management System is a light-weight, open-source, flexible Business Process Management (BPM) Suite that allows you to create, execute, and monitor business processes throughout their life cycle. The business processes allow you to model your business goals. They describe the steps that need to be executed to achieve those goals. It depicts the order of these goals in a flow chart. The business processes greatly improve the visibility and agility of your business logic.
JBoss BPM Suite creates the bridge between business analysts, developers and end users by offering process management features and tools in a way that both business users and developers like. The life cycle of a Business processes includes authoring, deployment, process management and task lists, and dashboards and reporting.

10.1. The JBoss BPM Suite Engine

The core of JBoss BPM Suite is a light-weight, extensible workflow engine called the BPM Suite engine in BPMN 2.0 format, written in pure Java that allows you to execute business processes. It can run in any Java environment, embedded in your application or as a service. It has the following features:
  • Solid, stable core engine for executing your process instances.
  • Native support for the latest BPMN 2.0 specification for modeling and executing business processes.
  • Strong focus on performance and scalability.
  • Light-weight. You can deploy it on almost any device that supports a simple Java Runtime Environment. It does not require any web container at all.
  • Pluggable persistence with a default JPA implementation (Optional).
  • Pluggable transaction support with a default JTA implementation.
  • Implemented as a generic process engine, so it can be extended to support new node types or other process languages.
  • Listeners to be notified of various events.
  • Ability to migrate running process instances to a new version of their process definition.