Re: [jbpm-dev] jBPM5 Request for Comments

Hi Kris, We have no dependency on jPDL - we have a standalone Groovy DSL for defining the processes. It gets parsed into a ProcessDefinitionImpl and ActivityImpl model that references a small set of ActivityBehaviours. We provide a Grails-style environment for defining node behaviour that plug into these ActivityBehaviours. The emphasis is on providing a somewhat simplified process definition language that consists largely of assembling an extensible set of pre-programmed node behaviours. We probably could also have layered this on top of jPDL, but it seemed like using the PVM directly was a cleaner approach. It's a bit of an aside, but one other thing that we've done is layer multi-tenancy support on top of jBPM - that is, the ability to support multiple isolated domains/organizations in the same jBPM instance (and database). We are likely to have too many customers to make it practical to isolate each one in its own database schema. It would be great to see this in any new version of jBPM. Related to this, we are also intending to take a look at adding some more sophisticated process deployment functionality - for example, to allow different organizations to share process definitions. I'd be happy to discuss any of this in more detail with you if it's interesting/useful, although I may have to get a nod from management and take this off-list. Thanks, Alex. -----Original Message----- From: Kris Verlaenen [mailto:kverlaen@redhat.com] Sent: 27 April 2010 00:30 To: McManus,Alexander Cc: jbpm-dev(a)lists.jboss.org Subject: Re: [jbpm-dev] jBPM5 Request for Comments Alex, When you are talking about a Groovy-based domain-specific language, could you provide some detail on what you are actually trying to achieve by using the PVM directly (for example, are you extending jPDL or providing your own language altogether)? It is probably true that more emphasis has been put on providing a clean client API, and there's still some risk associated with using the PVM directly. We hope to tackle this as well as part of the modularization of the project. Kris