[jboss-user] [jBPM] New message: "Some questions and feedback from beginner"

[Maciej Swiderski]

User development,

A new message was posted in the thread "Some questions and feedback from beginner":

http://community.jboss.org/message/521872#521872

Author  : Maciej Swiderski
Profile : http://community.jboss.org/people/swiderski.maciej

Message:
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Hi,
 
I have recently started to explore jBPM (as part of evaluation for possible candidate for my company) and so far I am very impressed. Thou I ran into some issues that are not covered in user or dev guide. So I decided to try to find some answers here. Hope this is the right place...
 
Currently I am trying jBPM on Tomcat, version of jBPM is 4.3.
Some questions:
1. Is it possible to start a process from jBPM console when process requires variables to be provided at startup? So far I was getting exception while starting but no message that would indicate what is the cause of it.
2. As far as I understand jBPM 4.3 supports BPMN 2.0, is that correct? I looked thru some documents about BPMN and there are bit more artefacts available that in jBPM GPD editor. Are there any plans to support all of them? I am mainly interested in events that can be modeled (start and intermediate) and data objects and annotations. I am sure that business users will demand that 
3. Is it possible to (any tools available) for transforming jPDL to BPEL?
4. Is there any remote service available for accessing jBPM runtime (web service) for signaling or the API is the only way to do it?
5. Is it possible to browse thru already finished processes via jBPM console? I mean is it possible to see what nodes were executed for given process instances?
 
And now time for a small feedback (hope it can be useful to someone):
In general everything works as described in documentation delivered with the product, which was a positive surprise. The only problem I encountered was related to reports in jBPM console. Firstly, all reports crashed due to lack of jdbc driver for hsqldb, which I assumed was present in tomcat lib directory. But obviously that was not enough. After some investigation the problem was caused by BIRT that assumed jdbc driver to be present in completely different location (CATALINA_HOME/birt/ReportEngine/plugins/org.eclipse.birt.report.data.oda.jdbc_2.3.2.r232_v20090212/drivers). By placing hsqldb driver there two of the reports started to work properly. But another problem pop up with other reports. It tried to load MySQL driver instead of hsqldb. The issue was that some of the reports configuration in CATALINA_HOME/birt were pointing to MySQL driver. Changing that resulted with all reports being available.
 
Ok, that's it for now. I will keep exploring jBPM and hopefully it ill be less and less issues and more and more good features.
Thanks for your replies.
Maciej

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