[jboss-user] [jBPM] - jBPM 4 is dead?

[Koen Aers]

Koen Aers [http://community.jboss.org/people/koen.aers%40jboss.com] replied to the discussion

"jBPM 4 is dead?"

To view the discussion, visit: http://community.jboss.org/message/539291#539291

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Guys,

There is no need to panic.

First of all, if any of you has decided to adopt the community components (as opposed to the supported versions) they did that with the knowledge that there was a chance that the piece of software they downloaded would never be officially supported. That is stated clearly on the community download pages. Now luckily jBPM 4 is an open source project. The sources are available and you can adapt/tweak/change/fix any piece of code that is in the codebase yourself. It should not be that difficult to do and as you probably know, our forums are very alive and you'll likely get plenty of help if that would be needed.

Secondly, as the community is not something that is owned by Red Hat or JBoss but rather constituted by all you guys participating in discussions, opening JIRA issues and providing patches, there is no reason why jBPM 4 would need to die. It is true that the efforts of the Red Hat/JBoss employees will mostly be concentrated on further supporting jBPM 3.x and on starting the effort for jBPM 5. However, the efforts related to jBPM 4 will not be dropped and there will be more jBPM 4 releases. In addition this evolution does not in any way prohibit fixes for jBPM 4 to be contributed by other community members. A number of community members have already expressed interest in doing this, so there is a good chance that this will happen. An important task for these volunteers will probably be to provide a migration path from jBPM 4 to the future jBPM 5. 

Lastly, jBPM 5 will be an effort that reaps the fruit of jBPM 4 and Droolsflow and that will implement the BPMN2 standard. It is highly likely that the final solution will be very similar to both of those projects (they are already not that far apart right now) and that the transition from jBPM 4 to jBPM 5 will be very smooth. Of course, as I said before, the more input and collaboration we get for these features, the more likely it will be that they will be implemented.

I hope this removes at least some of the concerns.

Cheers,
Koen

P.S. While writing my anwer here, Alejandro made me aware of  https://community.jboss.org/blogs/mark.little/2010/04/23/the-future-of-workflow-in-jboss Mark Little's blog entry that provides an even much better anwer to what I'm trying to say ;-)

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