Hello All,
I believe the work on the upcoming release of jBPM has already been started - at least the planning, requirement gathering and establishing basic concepts. What I don't really see is the way times and dates will be handled by jBPM 5.
As far as I know the current 4.4 version does not really have any concept of different locales or time zones and business calendars: it seems that the assumption is that all end users / workflow actions will be in the same time zone.
This is a limitation even small / midsized companies can hit. Although having say a few hours difference between the US east and west coast might not be a big deal in most of the cases but the lack of locale/time zone support can be significant in other cases. For example I don’t really see the means to handle the scenario where your workflow crosses country borders and you want to set the task due date expressed in business days according the local environment.
Or if you have an application running with jBPM embedded into it in different time zones, but using the same database you might experience strange issues: some tasks might seem to be created in the future. Since the audit history contains the timestamps using the local date and time you might see a task being completed before the previous step, or even the before the date task itself was created.
What do you think about this – is there any plan to include support for different locales / time zones and business calendars in jBPM 5?