[jbpm-dev] Re: Collaboration

Thomas, I don't know if you know me but I'm a member of the JBoss Drools team and leading the ruleflow efforts and the integration between processes and rules. Our vision is to create a unified platform where rules and processes are simply different ways of expressing (some of your) business logic and can be seamlessly integrated. This would allow users to select the most appropriate paradigm for their problem and integrate rules and processes without requiring them to learn and integrate different products themselves. This is partially based on the observation that both rules and processes have a very similar life cycle: creation in a custom editor, storing your business logic in a repository, deployment to a runtime environment, monitoring and management of the execution, etc. We believe that is should be possible to offer an unified environment where this life cycle is supported as much as possible and both rules and processes are considered different types of business logic. Mark told me that you are creating a BPM API that can be used for both jBPM 3 and 4. It would be interesting to see whether ruleflow can also fit in here (and maybe in the long term whether we can offer a similar API for both rules and processes). I'm already working with Koen Aers on creating a shared core process definition model for both jBPM and Drools Flow, so there might be some overlap. I attached a screenshot of our progress so far (the core concepts). Is there any information available about the API that I could take a look at. I'd also be glad to provide you with more information about our approach or links to our API as well. I hope we'll be able to share some of the efforts of both teams. As I said already, I'm working with Koen on integrating and extending the eclipse-based process designer. But I'm also thinking about our repository (Guvnor) for storing business logic, or the BAM/SAM efforts. I would be interested in knowing what you guys are up to in the future to see whether there are some opportunities for collaboration. I've also been told that you are going to provide WS-HumanTask integration for handling human tasks. I have implemented a proof of concept implementation for Drools Flow that uses the WS-HT service from ActiveEndpoints to execute human tasks in Drools Flow. I also have some experience with Eclipse-BIRT for creating basic monitoring reports for our execution engine. So if I can be of any assistance, let me know. Kris ------------------------------------------------------------------------