[jbpm-dev] Features and jBPM 5

[Kris Verlaenen]

Brad Davis wrote:
> Audit Logging
> ==============
> I think we could just pass all Audit Logs into a queue.  However people want to process from that Topic is their business ;)  We are doing this at one client with a large throughput.  The benefit is that their secondary system which processes from the Queue can be responsible for the CPU needed to persist and also display [through a custom UI] the audit logs. OOTB, we could offer a listener to the Topic which can persist to the DB.  Another which may listen to the topic could be responsible for analytics such as throughput.  As the system scales, since these listeners would be standalone, people could move them off the default instance for performance sake.
>   
I personally believe that audit logging should be a standard solution 
but tweaked to the use case you want to use it for (otherwise you end up 
with a lot of data in the wrong format you don't really need).  I 
believe audit logging should be as simple as registering the right 
listeners (so you can register your own if you want).  I also agree on 
the offline auditing recommendation, though we'll need to do some 
performance testing to check whether we can get the gain we're hoping 
fore there.

> Web Editor
> ===============
> I think by providing an advanced, rich Eclipse development environment, we will come out ahead for sure.  Sure, it might look nice for presentations; but the minute there is a product bakeoff at a large customer, I imagine that will not stand up.  
>
> That said, a lot of our customers do ask if Workflows can be imported from Visio -- which the Business users generally are using.  Maybe they are targeting it for this purpose.  Regardless, developers always will have to get involved.  Also, I have never seen this as a deal-breaker when it comes to a company adopting the technology = low on the feature list in my opinion.
>   
One of the huge benefits of using a standard is that you don't have to 
do everything yourself, as there will be multiple projects out there 
trying to offer support for the same spec.  So for web tooling we are 
looking at leveraging the Signavio / Oryx editor.  Doing it ourselves 
would be a tremendous amount of work and not feasible as a short-term 
goal anyway.  But integration with an existing solution might be worth 
the effort, no?

Regarding Visio, I think there are some extension being developed (or 
maybe even out there) that allow you to export your BPMN2.  So in theory 
we should be capable of importing those, add the necessary execution 
details, and then execute.  As long as we stick to what the spec 
defines, this should even support round-tripping.

Kris