[jbpm-dev] jBPM3 - state of the art

[Thomas Diesler]

Dear Folks,

I took a close look at

Patterns-based Evaluation of Open Source BPM Systems
http://www.workflowpatterns.com/documentation/documents/BPM-07-12.pdf

This paper gives a good impression of where jBPM3 (jbpm-3.1.4) stands 
with respect to other Open Source BPM Systems and also some commercial ones.

I digested the results in

http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpmwiki/index.php?title=BPMSupportedPatterns

According to this research paper jBPM3 has

* complete support for 18 patters - 12%
* partial support for 8 patters - 0.5%
* no support for 121 patters - 87.5%

Every pattern is associated with a JIRA issue
https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBPM/component/12311941

Using this information we can decide and record, which patterns the 
future JBossBPM product should support through the API.

The current BPM CTS has a section on already supported patterns
http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpm-site/bpm-testsuite/surefire-report.html

The 1-Sep release of the API has (among other stuff) support for these 
basic patterns.

http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpmwiki/index.php?title=PatternControlSequence
http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpmwiki/index.php?title=PatternControlParallelSplit
http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpmwiki/index.php?title=PatternControlSynchronization
http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpmwiki/index.php?title=PatternControlExclusiveChoice
http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpmwiki/index.php?title=PatternControlSimpleMerge
http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpmwiki/index.php?title=PatternControlMultipleChoice
http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpmwiki/index.php?title=PatternDataTaskData
http://jbpm.dyndns.org/jbpmwiki/index.php?title=PatternDataCaseData

Please note, that the above pages use the Eclipse BPMN editor for 
process modelling. An initial set of issues with the editor are recorded 
here https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBPM/component/12311942

For details of that API release, please have a look at
https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBPM/fixforversion/12312520

Future releases of the API can then expand on the list of supported 
patterns. The scope of the JBossBPM supported patterns is still unclear 
and can hopefully be worked out with the help of Tom, Koen, Alejandro

cheers
-thomas