2.2. JBoss Business Process Management Suite

Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite is an open source business process management system that combines business process management and business rules management. JBoss BRMS offers tools to author rules and business processes, but does not provide tools to start or manage the business processes. Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite includes all the JBoss BRMS functionalities, with additional capabilities of business activity monitoring, starting business processes, and managing tasks using Business Central. JBoss BPM Suite also provides a central repository to store rules and processes.

2.2.1. JBoss BPM Suite Key Components

The Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite comprises the following components:
  • JBoss BPM Central (Business Central)
    Business Central is a web-based application for creating, editing, building, managing, and monitoring JBoss BPM Suite business assets. It also allows execution of business processes and management of tasks created by those processes.
  • Business Activity Monitoring Dashboards
    The Business Activity Monitor (BAM) dashboard provides report generation capabilities. It allows you to use a pre-difined dashboard and even create your own customized dashboard.
  • Maven Artifact Repository
    JBoss BPM Suite projects are built as Apache Maven projects and the default location of the Maven repository is <working-directory>/repositories/kie. You can specify an alternate repository location by changing the org.guvnor.m2repo.dir property.
    Each project builds a JAR artifact file called a kjar. You can store your project artifacts and dependent jars in this repository.
  • Execution Engine
    The JBoss BPM Suite execution engine is responsible for executing business processes and managing the tasks, which result from these processes. Business Central provides a user interface for executing processes and managing tasks.

    Note

    To execute your business processes, you can use Business Central web application that bundles the execution engine, enabling a ready to use process execution environment. Alternatively, you can create your own execution server and embed the JBoss BPM Suite and JBoss BRMS libraries with your application using the standard Java EE way.
    For example, if you are developing a web application, include the JBoss BPM Suite/BRMS libraries in the WEB-INF/lib folder of your application.
  • Business Central Repository
    The business artifacts of a JBoss BPM Suite project such as process models, rules, and forms are stored in Git repositories managed through the Business Central. You can also access these repositories outside of Business Central through the git or ssh protocols.

2.2.2. JBoss BPM Suite Features

JBoss BPM Suite provides the following features:
  • Pluggable human task service based on WS-HumanTask for including tasks that need to be performed by human actors.
  • Pluggable persistence and transactions (based on JPA / JTA).
  • Web-based process designer to support the graphical creation and simulation of your business processes (drag and drop).
  • Web-based data modeler and form modeler to support the creation of data models and process and task forms.
  • Web-based, customizable dashboards and reporting.
  • A web-based workbench called Business Central, supporting the complete BPM life cycle:
    • Modeling and deployment: To author your processes, rules, data models, forms and other assets.
    • Execution: To execute processes, tasks, rules and events on the core runtime engine.
    • Runtime Management: To work on assigned task, manage process instances.
    • Reporting: To keep track of the execution using Business Activity Monitoring capabilities.
  • Eclipse-based developer tools to support the modeling, testing and debugging of processes.
  • Remote API to process engine as a service (REST, JMS, Remote Java API).
  • Integration with Maven, Spring, and OSGi.