JBoss JBPM Training

The JBoss jBPM training course is designed for Java developers and architects that wish to gain an understanding of workflow and business process management concepts and how they are implemented in the open source JBoss jBPM product. This is a 2 day course that includes both theory and hands-on labs.

Course Modules

1. Workflow and BPM
   We start with explaining the goals and position of workflow management systems in a software architecture. The general concept of a workflow management system is explained and compared to alternatives. Briefly, we add some pointers to academic research and specifications and standardisation efforts in this area.
2. Workflow responsibilities
   The main responsibility of a workflow management system is to manage the state of multi step business processes executions. Process modelling is mainly concerned with specifying the steps in a business process. This is the primary responsibility, but each workflow management system supports a number of additional responsibilities such as context management, task management, persistence, exception handling, etc... We'll give an overview of the most common responsibilities and mention the more exotic ones. This is very valuable information for comparing workflow management systems. Typically other tools take a subset of the responsibilities and mix them into a monolithic block. Identifying these responsibilities in isolation gives a powerful framework for comparing workflow management systems.
3. Application architecture
   JBoss jBPM only has a dependency on a JVM and a database. This feature makes it extremely flexible with respect to the environment in which JBoss jBPM needs to be deployed. With these simple dependencies in mind, we explore how JBoss jBPM can be deployed in a standalone environment like e.g. an ant task, in a web application and as an EJB in a clustered environment. From these examples, students can extract the knowledge to deploy JBoss jBPM in any other java environment.
4. Test Driven Development (TDD) applied to workflow
   TDD has proven itself as a valuable instrument for developing robust object software. But in the field of business process management, TDD is not yet adopted. The minimal dependencies of JBoss jBPM allow the writing of plain JUnit tests against a process. This comes down to writing scenarios in which your process will be executed. The JBoss jBPM project contains a process development environment with an example process and test. In a hands-on lab session, students will learn how to set up this environment and how to write test scenarios for their processes. As a dessert, we will take a step back and see how this fits into the overall software development process.
5. Graph based modelling
   Current workflow management have very different process languages. However, all of these languages are based on a simple directed graph. We will show how JBoss jBPM uses a directed graph as the base layer for the JPDL language. Furthermore, students will gain insight in how this base layer can be extended to support any workflow language. Those concepts will enable students to understand the inner workings of the JBoss jBPM engine.
6. Process modelling with JPDL
   JBoss jBPM is designed with workflow patterns in mind. Workflow patterns describe a set of elementary workflow modelling constructs. The jBPM process definition language (JPDL) is the set of concrete modelling constructs in JBoss jBPM. We will teach each of the constructs, show how these constructs are expressed as XML and explain the runtime behaviour of the constructs.
7. Integrating customizations
   JBoss jBPM has been designed from the start with the idea that a process definition should be a combination of a declarative process description with programming logic bound to it. To accommodate this need, JBoss jBPM has a very clean mechanism of coupling plain java-code to the process. The main customizations are actions, serializers and synchronization. A hands-on lab will make students feel comfortable to add their project specific code into their own processes.
8. Preview of new features in JBoss jBPM 3.0
   Some exciting and innovative new features are on the roadmap of JBoss jBPM. Most important is the pluggable architecture. This is a new architecture that is defined in terms of workflow responsibilities. For each responsibility, we will have a module. Users can select the subset of modules they want to use. Furthermore, they will also be able to extend the core engine capabilities by pluggin in a new module. Another exciting improvement is the completion of the separation of persistency.