[jbpm-dev] Proposal for jBPM5 first release

[Kris Verlaenen]

Maciej Swiderski wrote:
> Hi,
>
> first of all, that's really great that jBPM 5 is on its way to be 
> started. This is really important to know because we can prepare some 
> long term planning.
> There was number of different threads about jBPM5 features and I have 
> to admit that they cover almost everything that is required for first 
> release, to make it interesting for any customer. I hope you could 
> come up with a long term road map as well to illustrate to the 
> customer that it is going to be enhanced and will live quite some time 
> (that I am sure of but sometime without hard facts it is not so easy 
> to convince business people).
Yes, we're focusing on the first releases now (for obvious reasons ;)), 
but we'll be defining a long-term roadmap as well, which will include 
productization etc.

> In one of the threads there was discussion about web editor for 
> process definitions and I have to say that from what I noticed so far, 
> for business experts this is really important. Eclipse based tools are 
> not of any interest for them, they are far to complex (as they used to 
> say). Web based editors - this is what they want, especially with some 
> repository capabilities and (what would be perfect) with collaboration 
> capabilities where business experts can share and exchange ideas (and 
> processes). What is really important as well about web process editor 
> is to have "two way support", meaning that process developed in web 
> editor can be consumed by eclipse based tool and the other way around 
> without lost of information. This was something that was missing in 
> current web editor (signavio) and eclipse plugin for jBPM 4.x.
Like I said in the previous mail, I hope that BPMN2 will be the answer 
here, providing interoperability between different (possibly external) 
components, even for round-tripping.  But we need to give the spec and 
the tools a little more time to mature still I think.

> Another thing that could be quite useful is to have some kind of 
> mechanism that will support compensation. What would be good to have 
> is to provide compensation manager on process instance level that 
> could invoke some stuff in case of rollback (unexpected errors on 
> process execution). Process execution is within transaction boundaries 
> but unfortunately not everything is (or can be done) in transactional 
> manner. This does not have to be very sophisticated it is just to give 
> some kind of listeners that could be used by process developers to 
> take some actions on rollback, even if that will be just to send an 
> email to administration personnel.
Do you see this as specific to one specific process, or just a 
compensation mechanism for all processes executing on your engine (like, 
if anything goes wrong, do this)?

> Ok, I think that's all. As mentioned before, most of the items were 
> already addressed by others. Thanks for that, and hope the dialog will 
> go on.
>
> Last but not least, I would like to take the chance to offer my help 
> in development (and any other tasks you find me useful). So whenever 
> you have complete plan and some issues to do, just let me know I will 
> be on it ;)
That would be great, I bet we can find you plenty of tasks ;)  Drop me a 
private email and maybe say what areas you are mostly interested in 
(like are you more a core, web or eclipse guy), or if you have specific 
ideas on what you want to do, and we'll see how we take it from there !

Kris