Small steps with big feet

Speaking at JDD09 and Devoxx

After a marvellous honeymoon in Indonesia, it is now time to get back to my second love. The jBPM 4.2 release is quite close around the corner and Tom already showed me some nifty new features which you will definitely like. Be sure to keep an eye on our blogs to be the first to know when we unleash 4.2.

Also, in the next month, Tom and I will be talking about jBPM4 at two big conferences:

This Friday (16 October) we will be in Krakow, Poland, presenting ‘Pimp your domain model with jBPM‘ as the Keynote of the Java Developers Day 09.

I’ve never been to Poland before, so I’m quite curious to meet the Polish jBPM users and see the country. More information about our talk can be found on the JDD website.

Next month, from 16 to 20 November, it is once again time for the Nirvana of European Java Conferences. Yes, I’m talking about Devoxx. It makes my Belgian heart more than proud, to see what Stephan Janssens always manages to organize in our little country.

The last couple of years, I’ve always been lurking around as an attendant, but this year a childhood dream comes true. Together with Tom, I’ll be presenting two talks (one University and one Conference talk) and one BOF at Devoxx. I will make sure the talks will be worth the trip to Antwerp! See the Devoxx website for more information about the talks.

So, I certainly hope to meet you at one of these conferences. If you have any feedback for us, or you just are in the neighbourhood and want to have a little chat, don’t hesitate to come up to us. We are more than eager to meet the community people!

Of course, between the conferences we will not sit still and keep working at the world’s greatest BPM engine … Stay tuned!

Train Ticket Demo overview (final part) – Getting started with jBPM in less than a minute!

In the last two weeks, I’ve been putting articles online that discuss the various stages of the BPM lifecycle using a real-life business problem and of course jBPM. Now that all articles, the source and binaries are online, it’s time to give an overview such that people can easily get started with jBPM. If you’ve already read all the articles you can safely skip to the next section, because there I have a final screencast available for you!

In the future, we’ll definitely enhance and modify the demo. We’ll also be using the demo as a starting point for jBPM talks we’ll do in the coming months (eg. JDD & Devoxx). In the meantime, any feedback on the train ticket demo and these articles is greatly appreciated!

Overview

• Part 1: modeling the process with BPMN – In this article, the business problem and solution process is explained. The process is modeled using the BPMN notation in the Signavio jBPM editor. (screencast)

• Part 2: coding the business process – Here, the business process model from the previous article is enhanced with business-specific Java logic. The article shows how easy it is to test jBPM processes in a regular Java environment. (screencast)

• Intermezzo: how does jBPM fit into my architecture? In this article, I explain what benefits jBPM gives you when you design your architecture. It is shown that jBPM is extremely flexible and embeddable in any Java technology. Also be sure to read the comments, since there is some good content there!

• Part 3: prototyping with the jBPM console – The business process from the second article is here used as basis to develop a protoype for the final application, using the out-of-the-box jBPM console and the taskform functionality. (screencast)

• Part 4: the end application – here you can download the complete demo application. This article shows also how the principles of the intermezzo article are applied in practice. (screencast)

• Part 5: BI and BAM – This articles shows how easy it is to gather (SLA and KPI) metrics from business process executions and how to make shiny charts of them which managers do love so much. (screencast1 & screencast2)

Getting started with jBPM takes only one minute of your time

First impressions are important.

That’s why we at jBPM have taken care that getting started with jBPM can be done by issuing just a single command. Not having enough time also isn’t an excuse anymore, which is demonstrated by the following screencast. Here you’ll see the demo setup of jBPM in action, providing you with

• a JBoss 5 application server
• with the jBPM engine installed as a service, usable by other applications
• also including: the Signavio editor to start the modeling
• the jBPM console to start playing around with processes
• a working Eclipse to start developing your business processes

Ow yeah. All of this you get in LESS THAN A MINUTE.

Enjoy!

And now for me its time for some sweet relaxation after working hard to push these articles out to the world (I’m marrying tomorrow – so it’ll be quiet for some time here ).

The obligatory Hello World

Nothing is more difficult than choosing what to talk about in the first post of a blog. First impressions are made so fast in this world of paperless knowledge, that a task with such importance can be as daunting as jumping into the water without tipping your toes first.

So, I’m going to play safe: I’m going to write a ‘Hello World’ post.

As with any Hello World it merely shows that I can let the system show what I tell it to show. But at this point, there is no real content, nothing meaningfull behind the keyboard input…

So … hello, world ! World, if you need some more information about myself, please click the ‘about me’ link left of the screen. I know, the link doesn’t work at the moment, but it will be fixed soon. I will use this blog to share my experiences along the road toward my ‘Software Nirvana’.

According to Wikipedia, ‘Nirvana’ describes the perfect peace of the mind that is free from craving, anger and other afflictive states. The journey towards a software engineering nirvana may be never-ending and isn’t well-defined, but I believe (and with me many fellow developers) it is worth the trouble.

To finish up this first post, I will explain the blog’s subtitle ‘small steps with big feet’ summarized in 3 points, since some folks already questioned me about it:

• The journey towards ‘software perfection’ is one of taking small steps at a time. Having big feet and taking those small steps is not easy ( = creating software is not easy). By no means this blog will contain the path to enlightment (= perfect software), but it will contain some stories about what I do and try to become a better developer.
• I simply have big feet (it’s true), but venturing through the software world requires me to take small steps.
• I needed at least one absurd quote on my blog.

So, if you made it this far, thanks for reading. More will follow soon.

Joram