Re: [jbpm-dev] Proposal for jBPM5 first release
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