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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
If you are a designer or developer who wants to build and operate business process-centric applications, then this book is for you. Knowledge of the basic concepts of application development in Java will be helpful in following the concepts covered in the book, but is not necessary.
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Seitenzahl: 343
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Mastering jBPM6
Mastering jBPM6
Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing
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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: June 2015
Production reference: 1220615
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78328-957-8
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Credits
Authors
Simone Fiorini
Arun V Gopalakrishnan
Reviewers
Ruben Andres Ghio
Jerónimo Ginzburg
Federico Weisse
Commissioning Editor
Rukhsana K
Acquisition Editor
Vinay Argekar
Content Development Editors
Anand Singh
Sweny M. Sukumaran
Technical Editor
Tanmayee Patil
Copy Editor
Tani Kothari
Project Coordinator
Vijay Kushlani
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Graphics
Valentina D'silva
Jason Monteiro
Production Coordinator
Aparna Bhagat
Cover Work
Aparna Bhagat
About the Authors
Simone Fiorini is a seasoned professional with 20 years of software development experience, specializing in large-scale software systems, mission critical applications, and project management in a wide variety of computing environments and platforms, with a focus on EAI, BPM, and integration-oriented tools. His latest efforts are focused on an online reservation system for a large Middle East railway company and a scalable, reactive, financial market data server for a leading Italian banking group's investment bank.
A graduate of both Università di Parma (earth science) and University of Milan (engineering of computing systems), Simone resides near Brescia, where he's trying to grow roses and other fragrant flowers for his wife, Giuliana, and their two sons.
I'd like to thank my wife, Giuliana, and my sons as they support everything I do any way I do it, my parents, my brothers, and all the people who made this book possible.
Arun V Gopalakrishnan has more than 9 years of experience in creating architecture, designing, and developing enterprise applications used in the domains of BFSI, supply chain management, and telecom businesses.
He graduated as a bachelor of technology in electronics and communications and holds a master's degree in software systems. Currently, he is playing the role of a software architect in designing and developing an enterprise middleware platform.
He is well versed in service-oriented, event-driven architectures and has experience in integrating jBPM with enterprise architecture. He is passionate about learning new technologies and improving his knowledge base and expertise in JEE, OOAD, SOA, EDA, expert systems, and distributed computing.
Along with this technical expertise, he enjoys engineering software applications and is an avid follower, practitioner, and mentor of agile and continuous delivery models. He believes in tools and is well versed in creating, using, and extending DevOps tools, such as Eclipse, Maven, Git, Gerrit, Jenkins, Sonar, JIRA, and MediaWiki, to enhance the efficiency of development teams.
First and foremost, I would like to thank the editors Vinay Argekar, Sweny Sukumaran, Tanmayee Patil, and Anand Singh for their immense support and help in getting this book ready for publishing. They made the process smooth and enjoyable and were patient and cheerful with those painful follow-ups when I missed deadlines. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the technical reviewers, Federico Weisse, Jerónimo Ginzburg, and Ruben Andres Ghio, for their feedback, which helped shape this book.
Authoring a book with an already tight regular job always calls for long weeks. Without my supportive family, I could not have taken yet another step in my career.
My mentors and colleagues were always my source of confidence and energy. I would like to thank them for the knowledge, experience, and goodwill that they share with me. It has always been great working with you.
Sincere gratitude goes to the open source community, particularly the jBPM community, which has supported me a lot in understanding technologies and tools. I am grateful for working with them and hope that their members will find this book useful!
To the Almighty, for surrounding me with these beautiful people and enjoyable opportunities.
About the Reviewers
Ruben Andres Ghio was born on June 5, 1981, under the zodiac sign of Gemini in the city of Quilmes, Argentina. When he was 2 years old, he moved to Villa Gesell, a small city over the sea. This place was his home for almost 11 years. After that, he returned to Buenos Aires, where he got a high school degree with a specialization in economics.
At the age of 22, he graduated as a system engineer from the National Technological University of Buenos Aires.
As a River Plate fan, Ruben has practiced a lot of different sports, but he has always had special feelings for his two favorites: tennis and soccer, which he still practices. You can follow him on Twitter at @rubenghio.
Ruben has been working with technology since 2002, starting as a Visual Basic developer for one of the most important banks in Argentina. After 2.5 years, he moved to one of the biggest technology companies in the world, where he started working as a Java developer, and after almost 3 years, he started to focus on his career as an IT architect, a skill he developed for the next 4 years. Currently, he is working as a senior IT architect at one of the biggest open source companies in the world, developing and building modern and innovative projects for government and private companies across Latin America.
I would like to thank my wife, who always supports me in all the things I do, suggesting, encouraging, and helping me out.
Jerónimo Ginzburg works at Red Hat as a senior architect in the consulting team. He has a computer science degree from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and over 15 years of experience in developing Java Enterprise applications. He is a strong believer in open source and agile software development. Jerónimo joined Red Hat in 2008 and, since then, has helped many Latin American companies adopt Drools and jBPM. He has co-written several software engineering articles published in refereed conferences and journals, and he was also the technical reviewer for the book jBPM Developer Guide, Packt Publishing.
I would like to thank my beautiful wife, Mariana, and my newborn son, Ramiro, for their love, patience, and support during this revision.
Federico Weisse was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has over 15 years of expertise in the IT industry. In his career, he has worked with several technologies and programming languages, such as C, C++, ASP, and PHP; different relational databases (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and PostgreSQL); platforms (AS400, Unix, and Linux); and mainframe technologies.
In 2002, he adopted Java/J2EE as his main technology. He has been working with it since then and has become a specialist in this field. A couple of years later, he got involved with BPM systems and has been working with JBPM since 2009.
Nowadays, he is a J2EE architect at one of the most important healthcare providers in Argentina.
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Preface
jBPM is a leading open source BPM and workflow platform whose development is sponsored by Red Hat under Apache Software License (ASL) licensing. The jBPM product has been around for almost 10 years; its strongest points rely on flexibility, extensibility, and lightness, and it is a modular, cross-platform pure Java engine that is BPMN2 compliant.
It features a robust management console and development tools that support the user during the business process life cycle: development, deployment, and versioning. It integrates with widely-adopted frameworks and technologies (SOAP, REST, Spring, Java EE CDI, and OSGi) and provides off-the-shelf support to Git and Maven.
It fits into different system architectures and can be deployed as a full-fledged web application or as a service; it can be tightly embedded into a classical desktop application or loosely integrated into a complex event-driven architecture. In its default configuration, jBPM can be hosted by the enterprise class application server Red Hat EAP 6.x or the bleeding-edge Red Hat WildFly 8 server.
Mastering JBPM6 takes you through a practical approach to using and extending jBPM 6.2. This book provides a detailed jBPM 6.2 overview; it covers the BPM notation supported by the engine and explains the advanced engine and API topics focusing, as much as possible, on several working practical examples.
The book presents the user with solutions to common real-time issues like BAM (which stands for business activity monitoring) and production scenarios.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Business Process Modeling – Bridging Business and Technology, gives the user an overview of the BPM environment, introduces the jBPM world and give insight to the big picture of business logic integrated platform.
Chapter 2, Building Your First BPM Application, starts by taking the user straight to the jBPM tool stack by providing the reader with a hands-on product installation and configuration tutorial, and then, it tackles beginner topics such as business process modeling and deployment.
Chapter 3, Working with the Process Designer, digs deep into web-based jBPM tools to illustrate to the user the main jBPM web designer features: user forms, scripting, and process simulation.
Chapter 4, Operation Management, describes the new jBPM artifacts architecture, focusing on Maven repositories (modules and deployment), engine auditing and logging analysis, jobs scheduling, and a full working BAM customization example (with Dashboard integration).
Chapter 5, BPMN Constructs, illustrates the BPMN2 constructs implemented by jBPM and provides insights and caveats about their usage by commenting a contextually ready-to-use source code example.
Chapter 6, Core Architecture, covers all the jBPM modules (for example, human task service, persistence, auditing, and configuration) by elaborating on how to leverage engine functionalities with the help of several source code examples.
Chapter 7, Customizing and Extending jBPM, explores engine customization areas with a practical approach; it provides the user with explanations on how to customize persistence, human task service, marshalling mechanism and the work item handler architecture.
Chapter 8, Integrating jBPM with Enterprise Architecture, describes how jBPM can integrate with external applications through SOAP, REST, or JMS either as a client or a server. It offers insights on how to leverage its services in a Java EE application.
Chapter 9, jBPM in Production, explores the jBPM system features when dealing with service availability, scalability, and security; it provides tips and techniques related to engine performance tuning in production environments.
Appendix A, The Future, briefly details the trends and future of Business Process Modeling.
Appendix B, jBPM BPMN Constructs Reference, is a quick reference for the BPMN constructs supported by jBPM.
What you need for this book
You will need the following software to be installed before running the code examples:
jBPM requires JDK 6 or a higher version. JDK 6 or newer versions can be downloaded from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html. There are installation instructions on this page as well. To verify that your installation was successful, run java –version on the command line.
Download jbpm-6.2.0.Final-installer-full.zip from http://sourceforge.net/projects/jbpm/files/jBPM%206/jbpm-6.2.0.Final/. Just unzip it in a folder of your choice. The user guide (http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v6.2/userguide/jBPMInstaller.html) includes instructions on how to get started in a simple and quick manner.
The jBPM setup requires Ant 1.7 or later (http://ant.apache.org/srcdownload.cgi).
The additional required software is as follows:
The preferred development IDE to run the examples is the Eclipse Kepler distribution, which can be automatically downloaded and pre-configured with the BPMN installation process.
Who this book is for
This book is primarily intended for jBPM developers, business analysts, and process modelers, and, to some extent, for project managers who must be exposed to the jBPM platform features. The book assumes that you have prior knowledge of business analysis and modeling, and, of course, Java; basic knowledge of jBPM is also required.
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Chapter 1. Business Process Modeling – Bridging Business and Technology
"All business does IT" (Information Technology). This was a superlative but a futuristically interesting tweet I came across recently. The impact of information technology on business in recent years has been overwhelming. They are like two large galaxies in our universe, colliding and merging. The current state of this merger can be defined by one term - collaboration. Businesspeople collaborate with information technology (IT) people and use IT services to continuously improve and deliver commercially viable and profitable product/services to their customers.
Collaboration quintessentially needs effective communication, and Business Process Modeling smoothly fits into this scenario. Business process modeling is not new; business people have always used it. Models were developed in mind, and then, they were written down as text or depicted as diagrams. With IT embracing business, these models evolved into standard flow charts and activity diagrams. However, there was ambiguity; the diagrams and text provided by business as requirements were interpreted by the technical people and they had their own representation, architectural models, requirement documents, and design. This was duplication of effort and people, intensive, often with a line of meetings between business stakeholders and information technologists negotiating, and arriving at conclusions about the business requirements. This being the scenario, what improvement does business process modeling bring to the table? Business process modeling brings in the concept of a common artifact between business and information technologists.
Business models are prepared by business analysts and shared with technologists. They collaborate and improve on the model and arrive at an artifact that is executable. Further, technologists as always reduce their work by automating their involvement; that is, we are moving largely to software systems where business people can configure the business process and execute it without the intervention of an information technologist.
Concluding the philosophy, let us jump to the larger context of Business Process Management (BPM) and discuss it in detail. This chapter covers the following concepts:
Business process management
BPM involves the designing, modeling, executing, monitoring, and optimizing of business processes. A specialized software system that helps achieve these objectives completely is called Business Process Management System (BPMS). Most of the IT infrastructure used in business is in fact part of one or more business processes, and a BPMS should have the capability to manage the complete life cycle of a business management process. Further, jBPM provides a complete BPMS.
A business process consists of a set of activities, organized to complete a specific business objective, which varies from creating a product to delivering a service. A business process model also provides a visual representation of the business processes. The activities in a business process (also called tasks) are connected to represent the execution flow of a business process; further, these activities can be categorized.
jBPM helps its users to define and model business processes by using its process designers. Business users can in fact design the business process online, and efficient versioning and history capabilities help in making the activity of modeling business processes collaborative. There are provisions to simulate how a business process might behave during runtime. jBPM also provides capabilities to migrate the process definition to an updated version when business changes stipulate process improvements.
The defined business process models are deployed to BPM software, where instances of these process definitions are created to execute the process. jBPM provides the capability of executing business processes and has complete operation management capabilities such as tracking, controlling, and maintaining the history of the life cycle of all process instances.
Human interaction management
An important concept that we need to discuss in detail while explaining BPMS is Human Interaction Management (HIM). The activities that form business processes can be broadly classified into automatic and manual. Automatic activities are those that can be completed by the software system without any manual intervention. For example, in a banking transaction process, the customer has to provide the details of the transaction, such as the bank account number to which the money needs to be transferred and the amount to be credited into this account. This is a manual activity. In contrast, if an SMS alert needs to be sent to the customer's mobile as part of this process, no manual intervention is needed; the software can fetch the mobile number registered with the customer's account and send the SMS automatically. An SMS alert is an automatic activity in the banking transaction process.
Therefore, human tasks are in fact human interactions in the business processes or, in a broader sense, human interactions with the software system in place. Usually, human activities are physical tasks that are performed outside the software system and the results or conclusions are then fed as input into the software system. Technically, from the perspective of the system, we can say that the associated human activities would provide an input to the business process and there would be scenarios where the business process would be able to continue only after manual decisions. For example, in a banking transaction business process, the customer has to provide a one-time password to continue the process.
A Human Interaction Management System (HIMS) should have the capability to handle the life cycle of a human activity, which includes notifying the users who are associated with the activity, collecting information or results from the users, and keeping track of the history of the tasks. The information collected from human interactions is used in process execution and decision making. jBPM has an in-built human task service and can be integrated with any other HIMS. The in-built human task service of jBPM is in compliance with the WS-Human Task specification.
jBPM also provides a form modeling feature that helps business analysts to design user interface forms that can be attached to the jBPM user task, using which information about the completion of the user task (if any) can be collected.
Business activity monitoring
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides online monitoring capabilities for business activities and enables businesses to arrive at key performance pointers by slicing and dicing the activity event data. BAM refers to a general software system that can monitor business processes, but attaching BAM with a BPM-based software system is relatively easy and powerful. In general, BAM software has the capability to show business data using dashboards, enabling business users to create customer reports and charts for performance indicators and trend analysis.
The jBPM core engine stores the process and task history and provides APIs to perform the BAM operations. Further, the jBPM tooling includes the dashboard builder, which enables its users to create custom dashboards from the business process history.
Consider a banking transaction process where a customer carries out a transaction from his/her account to another account. By analyzing the process history logs, the business user can create trend analysis reports of the peak hours of the day at which the maximum number of transactions took place. This analysis can be used to optimize related IT costs.
Another more frequent use case where BAM is applied is the optimization of a business process by avoiding process bottlenecks. Process bottlenecks can be caused by various problems including resource shortage (insufficient supply of staff) or a system not performing up-to-the-mark. A resource shortage problem would be quite obvious, but a system inefficiency may not be very apparent. For example, suppose that the One-Time Password (OTP) activity in a banking transaction process is often delayed. Let us say it takes more than one minute, which prompts users to perform the transaction again (or use the resend option) and leads to customer dissatisfaction. This also leads to wastage of resources by sending multiple OTPs; in other words, a delayed OTP confuses the customer and the bank further loses its credibility. Such issues are often noticed by banks when diligent customers notify them about the issues. BAMs can make the corrections of these issues more proactive, leading to increased customer satisfaction.
Business process simulation
Business process simulation provides the business user with the ability to see how the business process model created by them would work during runtime. Simulation is a term that goes hand-in-hand with modeling. A model designer would really love to have a simulator to test his model and understand the runtime impacts of his/her model. Business process simulation is the capability to analyze the runtime behavior of business processes. It helps in the optimization of business process models for quality, performance, and resource utilization.
Comparing business process simulation with the more regular models of testing these processes, we find that the user has to manually test these processes after deploying them in a Quality Assurance (QA) environment. Further, for automated verification, the user would have to rely on a programmer to script the automated test cases. In both cases, the process of verification is not carried out locally with the modeling process and delayed results mean iterations for corrections, adding to the cost of process improvements.
Business process simulation provides business users with the ability to see how the business process model created by them would work during runtime. The users can provide the simulation information, which includes the input to the processes, interrupts, and resource information to be used in the simulation mode. While executing the simulation, the software collects the statistical information about the running process, and this information can be analyzed by the users to optimize their business model.
jBPM is an early adopter and implementer of the Business Process Simulation Interchange Standard (BPSim). BPSim provides a standardized specification that allows business process models to be analyzed using a computer interpretable representation or a meta model. Using jBPM, the end user can provide the metadata for simulation by using the process designer and execute simulations to view the execution paths and the performance metrics associated with the various execution paths.
The business process model and notation
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the widely accepted standard for business process modeling and provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD). It is based on a flowcharting technique very similar to the activity diagrams of Unified Modeling Language (UML). BPMN is maintained by Object Management Group (OMG), and the current version is 2.0 (released in March 2011).
The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a standard notation readily understandable by business stakeholders. These include business analysts who create and refine the processes, technical developers responsible for implementing these processes, and operation managers who monitor and manage the processes. Consequently, BPMN serves as a common language, bridging the communication gap that frequently occurs between business process design and implementation. BPMN also serves as a communication medium between organizations who partner for achieving common business goals, to share functional processes and procedures.
One of the main differences between BPMN and other process definition standards such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is that BPMN supports human interaction. Human interaction support provides completeness to business process modeling, as humans are the primary actors in any business organization. Being a specification of visual programming notations, BPMN places considerable emphasis on diagrammatic representations of the elements of the business process model. So, a reader of a BPMN diagram can easily recognize the basic type of elements and understand the business process. BPMN conformance ensures a common visual representation, although it allows variations without dramatically changing the basic look and feel of the diagram.
The detailed explanation of the BPMN 2.0 specification can be found in the specification document.
Note
BPMN specification documents can be found at http://www.bpmn.org/.
Conformance to standard BPMN specification defines four types of conformance:
A jBPM implementation partially claims the first two types of conformance, namely process modeling conformance and process execution conformance. Although jBPM supports all core elements in process modeling, it does not support all the elements described in the specification.
Core elements
The chief constituents of a BPMN diagram, BPMN elements, can be broadly classified into five categories:
Flow Objects
Flow objects are the meat of BPMN; they are used to define how the business process would behave. The following are the major types of flow objects:
Data
Business process execution results in the production of data; for example, in the banking transaction process, the transaction details are data provided by the user regarding the transaction. This data would have to be saved or transferred to another activity for further processing. The following elements are the core of data modeling in BPMN.
Connecting Objects
Flow objects are connected to each other by using connecting objects. The following are the types of connecting objects:
Swimlanes
Swimlanes are a visual mechanism for organizing and categorizing activities and form the basis of cross-functional charts using BPMN. They represent an organization, a role or, a system. They are basically of the following two types:
