Using fireUntilHalt() is not recomended nowadays becasue it causes a bunch of problems like race conditions, rollbacks in TX and even loose of controll of your execution (you don't know in which thread is your process instance running!).
A better approach is to use an invocation pattern as the following one:
Each time you want to interact with a process, you need to execute these steps:
- get the session using JPAKnowledgeService (if you have different threads accessing the same session, it is recomended to queue all the access)
- invoque the desidered action: startProcess(), signalEvent(), completeWorkItem(), etc.
- invoque fireAllRules() this invocation is only useful if your process instances reached a Rule Node. If that is not the case, this invocation does nothing, so it is safe to execute it.
- dispose your session.
As far as I know, jBPM5 team and community are working in a more elegant solution that will encapsulate the call of fireAllRules() and make it transparent for the API user.
Best Regards