Qualitative comparison of development of embedded (jBPM engine) and remote (IPS) applications
Environment
- Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6.x and higher.
Issue
- We need to migrate our current, BPMS 6.x Business Central packaged application to a packaging supported by future versions of BPMS.
- We need to make a choice between Intelligent Process Server (IPS; remote) or jBPM engine (embedded) BPMS application development.
Resolution
Summary
- Embedded should offer more flexibility and - slightly - more performance, whereas remote should be less of a development effort.
Qualitative comparison of deployment modes
-
Embedded (jBPM engine): the process engine is deployed as a library contained in the application/service. The application/service interacts with the process engine using a Java API.
- Pros
- Better control of the interfaces exposed to external systems or users.
- Better control of the process engine - transaction control (full Java API).
- No remote calls, better response times.
- Cons
- Higher development costs.
- Updating the libraries requires recompiling and redeployment of the entire application/service (change of internal APIs).
- Subscription required for every deployed application.
- Pros
-
Remote (Intelligent Process Server): the process engine is deployed with IPS. IPS exposes various APIs for interacting with the process engine (REST and JMS).
- Pros
- Exposes by default REST and JMS APIs for interacting with process engine and management operations.
- APIs may be extended to cover other integration options.
- Common execution of multiple (projects') processes.
- Subscriptions only required for IPS nodes.
- Lower development costs.
- Cons
- Potentially less performant due to marshalling overhead
- Pros
This solution is part of Red Hat’s fast-track publication program, providing a huge library of solutions that Red Hat engineers have created while supporting our customers. To give you the knowledge you need the instant it becomes available, these articles may be presented in a raw and unedited form.
Comments