Thursday, August 21, 2008

First glimpse at the new BPM console

The new BPM console approaches it's first milestone and I'd like to use that opportunity to introduce you to the most important changes and new features.

Managing Process Definitions

Moving to GWT
More and more JBoss projects are moving to GWT. And they do it for a good reason:
  • If you are familiar with Java development and don't want to become the next web developer expert, then GWT is a good choice. With GWT you can stick to eclipse, fire up a debugger and write unit tests.
  • It has a rich set of UI widgets that you can use out of the box. The widgets also force a common look and feel across implementations.
Another good example of a successful GWT implementation is the Drools console.

Managing process instances

GWT is already quiet modular and it will allow for integration of consoles across projects. Another side effect is, that you can easily take a GWT application, or pieces of it, and hook it up with existing web applications. For instance this would allow users to embed the task management functionality of the BPM console with their own intranet.

Process instance details

Improve on BAM and BI functionality
Probably the biggest drawback of the current console is lack of BAM and BI features.

Workload overview

Improving on BAM and BI is not going to happen within a day, but you could expect to see the first metrics and stats in early releases and we try to add more bits and pieces while we move towards a full fledged BAM console. Because this going to overlap in both functionality and technology with the Service Activity Monitoring project, interested readers should have an eye on SAM as well.

Performance metrics

How to move forward
To begin with, we are going to provide a replacement for the existing jBPM console based on GWT. It will retain the current features and provide additional BI functionality. Initially we are going to leverage the existing jBPM3 backend and then gradually enrich it with SAM components or even replace it at all.

Process Graph View

Stay tuned. Next time we dive into implementation details: gchart, gwt and gwt-ext.

12 comments:

Joram Barrez said...

Heiko, this is impressive stuff and something jBPM really needs at the moment!

Keep up the good work!

When do you think the console will be released?

Heiko Braun said...

Thanks Joram. We are aiming at end of this year.

Mark Little said...

Very nice!

grandfatha said...

I am a GWT developer and I am interested in the motives on why you chose to use GWT instead of Richfaces. Could you eloborate on that?

Manesh said...

Heiko,Excellent stuff and especially infrastructure developers are in search for such an administrative console..Yes Joram..this is something JBPM really needs at the moment..

Congrats & best wishes for the release..

Anonymous said...

Hi Heiko...

Looks like we get an improvement at this area :-)

Where is this new console located in SVN exactly?

Thanks
Bernd

Heiko Braun said...

The SVN location is here:
https://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbpm/projects/gwt-console/trunk

George Gastaldi said...

Great Stuff !! Congratulations !

Heiko Braun said...

For anyone interested, I've put together a short project overview including source locations, building and testing and a high level design overview. It can found here: https://www.jboss.org/community/docs/DOC-12879

Mark Little said...

How about another blog entry ;-) ?

Unknown said...

The SVN location you post required the username and password?where can we get it anonymously?

markinsonmarshal said...

Hello All,
It was a wonderful experience reading this post....The details provided about the new BPM console are very interesting to learn.
Thanks.