@estaub: point taken. i definitely see that the docs need to be more rigorous in that respect. i don't yet see how we could define more rigorous behaviour in the engine itself. because i don't want to be limited to the bonita behaviour that you describe. this is also a performance issue. for simple processes that don't do heavy operations, spanning the transaction over multiple activities reduces the number of transactions. the transaction has an overhead and also, for each transaction, the runtime data has to be read again from the db. by default, i would like to keep the same behaviour in the process execution itself. but we can definitely provide better choice to the client. my current idea is that we enhance the command based session facade that sits in front of the jbpm-context-blocks. in such a session facade, you could choose to have it operate synchronously or asynchronously. this gives already the easy flexibility for a user to choose whether he wants the process operation to be in the same thread versus a separate thread. but in the process execution, i think we should keep the strategy as it is now, but only document it better. let me know if this doesn't matches your expectations View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4134763#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...