jBpm Joins JBoss Professional Open Source Federation

I am pleased to announce that the jBpm project has joined forces with JBoss to become a critical piece of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Platform. With the 2.0 version released today, jBPM will now become JBoss jBPM 2.0.

With the resources and commercial reach of JBoss behind it, I am excited that we have the opportunity to take JBoss jBPM to the next stage of growth and provide a full range of services and support around it. The JBoss Professional Open Source model enables me to continue working on the project, implement my vision for it, and cement its position as the leading open source workflow management system.

– Tom Baeyens, Founder and Lead Developer, JBoss jBPM

JBoss jBPM is a flexible, extensible workflow management system. Business processes, expressed in a simple and powerfull language and packaged in process archives, serve as input for the JBoss jBPM runtime server. JBoss jBPM bridges the gap between managers and developers by giving them a common language : the JBoss jBPM Process definition language (jPdl). This gives software project managers much more control on their software development efforts. After loading the process archive, users or systems perform single steps of the process. JBoss jBPM maintains the state, logs and performs all automated actions. JBoss jBPM combines easy development of workflow-applications with excellent enterprise application integration (EAI) capabilities. JBoss jBPM includes a web-application and a scheduler. JBoss jBPM can be used in the simplest environment like an ant task and scale up to a clustered J2EE application. For easy of evaluation, there is a download of a preconfigured JBoss application server. For more information about what JBoss jBPM is, refer to docs

JBoss jBPM is distributed under the LGPL license. More information about the LGPL license can be found at the JBoss website. This is great news for organisations that are looking for

• high-quality software, because the code is reviewed by the open source community.
• independance, because you're able to modify JBoss jBPM for your own purposes.
• cost-efficiency, first of all because its free and second, it puts an upper limit on the price of consultancy. Any java developer is able install and maintain a JBoss jBPM system.

In the past years, a large number of specification efforts have been done in the area of process definition languages : e.g. WfMC's XPDL, BPML, ebXML, BPEL4WS, XLANG, WSCI, ... Using one of these specification would have been problematic for various reasons (each of them could be the subject of a book but I'll just mention them short) :

• Too many specification and not one standard
• Far too complex
• No easy mechanism for coupling integration code to business process logic

The academic world has been involved with process modelling since the 70's. It is strange to see that the commercial products being built in the industry differ so much from the work that is already done by the academics. The sad part about this is that there is absolutely no consensus about process modelling which blocks large investements in this area.

One piece of research is especially valuable : Workflow Patterns. Prof. Wil van der Aalst has created a catalogue of workflow patterns analogue with the design patterns by the 'Gang of Four'. These patterns are a organised set of concepts that are distilled from the study of a wide range of commercial workflow products.

JBoss jBPM's internal model is created with these workflow patterns in mind. This guarantees that JBoss jBPM is able to support the most powerful process language constructs. On the other hand, JBoss jBPM is created to be simple and only expose the compex features to the advanced users.

	Sourceforge for project infrastructure.
	Jira for bug- and issue tracking.
	Clover for coverage testing.

18 Oct 2004 : released JBoss jBPM 2.0

18 Oct 2004 : jBpm joins JBoss and becomes JBoss jBPM

25 Aug 2004 : Tom Baeyens, the founder and lead developer of JBoss jBPM will speak at the 2004 JavaPolis Conference hosted by the BeJUG in Antwerp, Belgium

10 May 2004 : First preview of jbpm 2.0 is released. Download it, read about it and give us your feedback !

12 Apr 2004 : The jBpm support organisation is hiring ! If you know your way around java & struts, and you are able to work in Turnhout (Belgium). Let us know.

07 Apr 2004 : Version 1.0.1 is released that fixes some minor bugs.

24 Dec 2003 : jBpm 1.0 is released Get your hands on it !

23 Nov 2003 : Finally, the demo is back online. Enjoy it !

19 Nov 2003 : Added 4 hello world examples and added a detailed explanation on the user manual.

18 Sep 2003 : Some packaging problems forced us to quickly release an improved version of the same software jbpm-1.0-beta5.2

16 Sep 2003 : jBpm version 1.0 beta 5 is released. Try it ! This version contains the complete set of features for the first final version. After a stabilization period, the version 1.0 final will be released.

9 Sep 2003 : Release a preview of the new documentation set that is under construction : Take a look !

28 Jul 2003 : Read the interview with Tom Baeyens in OETrends : Success Tips from SourceForge's Top Open Source Admins

4 Jul 2003 : The jBpm license has changed from LGPL to The Apache License

4 Jul 2003 : Released version 1.0 beta 3. See the download-page

3 Jul 2003 : Scheduled the jBpm-developers day on 26 July in Bedford (UK). Let us know if you want to join us !

2 Jun 2003 : Website is available in french. Thanks to ekero.

2 Jun 2003 : I am going to JavaOne. If you would like to meet me there, send an email. Regards, Tom.

2 Jun 2003 : jBpm is participating in JSR207 "Process Definition for Java" of the java community process.

26 Apr 2003 : Version jbpm-1.0-beta2 is released. The complete website has been updated. The old website still can be found here.

28 Jan 2003 : Added support.

20 Jan 2003 : Released the first version jbpm-1.0-beta1. One package for process designers (jbpm-1.0-beta1.zip) and one package for jbpm-developers (jbpm-1.0-beta1-src.zip). Download here.

10 Jan 2003 : Published the javadocs.

9 Jan 2003 : Published the jBpm white paper (pdf) in the documentation section.

8 Jan 2003 : Added components, deployment and integration to documentation.

6 Jan 2003 : Updated the documentation.

5 Jan 2003 : The demo is brought online.

4 Jan 2003 : 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ... rrrrrrooooaaaaarrrrr ... and we have a lift off ! jBpm is present in sourceforge.net.