• It’s good to share when something around the projects, or how the people use the projects, is not right
• I want to write a post before the end of the year with a special thanks section

Introduction

In all the jBPM5 & Drools Community training that I gave during this year, I took about an hour discussing about the classic integration between a BPM System and Rule Engines. The strongest point in my perspective is the fact that most of the BPM Systems out there do a very poor integration with a Rule Engine (by the way, most of them integrates with Drools). Most of them just use a Rule Engine for Decision Points inside the process or to do some Data Validation. Most of the time this interaction is completely stateless by nature and the inferences capabilities of the Rule Engine are not used at all.

This diagram represents this integration, very stateless, very poor …

Classic BPMS and BRE integration

This kind of integration, nowadays is a common integration pattern widely accepted and used. The BPMN 2.0 specification defines a Business Rule Task that can be used to model this interaction.

Business Rule Task

This node/activity can be used to interact with the Rule Engine (the specification mention that the interaction can be done via a web service), sending information and receiving a set of results from the evaluation.

The Problem

Obviously we can solve real life problems with the previously mentioned pattern, but the problem begins when I notice some “Inception” (ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, … ) Anti Pattern being applied in practice.  So, what’s the real problem, let’s analyze the following figure:

But now we don't have just a Rule Engine

Hmm.. it looks OK!, the integration seems right.. The problem starts when a Smart Developer, having smart developers usually cause troubles , notice that if they are using Drools 5 as a Rule Engine, they get jBPM5 for free and they can start running processes inside the Business Logic Integration Platform. So.. They start to wonder.. why do I need my original BPM System, if I have jBPM5 fully integrated with Drools and I can avoid moving data all around, calling slow web services that needs to marshal complex structures into XML each time that I want to interact? This is a very long question, but a very valid one

If we don’t control this situation when it start, sooner or later we will find ourselves into the INCEPTION ANTI-PATTERN!!!!!

YO DAWG...

YO DAWG, I NOTICE THAT YOU LIKE PROCESS ENGINES, SO I’VE INCLUDED A PROCESS ENGINE INSIDE THE RULE ENGINE, SO WHEN YOU CALL THE RULE ENGINE FROM YOUR OLD PROCESS ENGINE YOU CAN START PROCESS INSIDE THE RULE ENGINE

Inception Number 1

A Business Process talking with a Rule Engine that start another Business Process but not in the same BPMS??? So, now the question is: if I already integrate or if I’m planning to integrate my application with a Rule Engine(specially Drools 5) and I already have another BPM System (different than jBPM5), what should I do?

Some Thoughts

If you notice that you are running in a situation like the one previously described, I suggest you to analyze your architecture once again before making any decision. If your company wants to leverage the power of a Rule Engine like Drools 5, they need to understand the context and all the other features that it provides now. Once again, Drools 5 its not just a Rule Engine.

In large companies, they can’t drop their old Process Engine. Most of the time they have paid a lot of money for it and they need to justify that investment. So, sooner or later, you will find this pattern.

Inception 2 - Keeping the old BPMS

Large companies tends to out source projects that use the BPMS as backbone to plugin and coordinate different components. If one or multiple companies are in charge of designing these business processes and interacting with the Rule Engine, they will start to avoid unnecessary communications to create high performance components and business processes. The Inception 2 – figure- shows how the company decide to move their process to the Drools BLiP and handle the logic and the orchestration of activities inside the Drools 5 runtime. Instead of defining a business process that interact in an stateless way with the Rule Engine. I’m not agree with keeping the old Process Engine, but there are sometime when that decision is more political than technical. The advantages of this approach are obvious. Now the processes and the rules are working together to achieve a business goal, in the same stateful context, sharing the same information.

I will not go over all the advantages of these approach, I will leave that for the jBPM Developer Book, but I want to mention that the fact that I start noticing this recurrent situation in different companies from different industries and different countries, is that people is realizing the power of the BLiP Platform. Developers are starting to understand how they can model and solve more complex scenarios using the synergy of all these approaches together.

So, what you should do? Learn, read and join the community of these amazing projects. Most of the times, when you are using a BPM System, someone in your team will introduce a Rule Engine. If you are working in Java there are high chances that the Rule Engine will be Drools, so take your time and know by hand that your smart developers will want to take advantage of all the features inside the platform and not just the 5% that represent stateless evaluations.

To wrap up this post, because it’s getting late and the new year is coming, I would like to mention a very similar scenario that I didn’t see yet, but I’m pretty sure that it will start to appear.

Similary to BPM, and in conjunction with BPM (see the 2012 BPM prediction -> http://blogs.forrester.com/derek_miers/11-12-31-a_bpm_prediction_for_2012_connecting_the_dots)  Complex Event Processing (CEP) is another hot topic.

Once again, how we integrate the Process Engine with the Processing Agents provided by the CEP component? We will need to waste time learning about these three components

Integration with CEP

Don’t worry! We are almost in 2012! Once again the BLiP platform remove the EVIL RED LINES

CEP + BPMS + Rule Engine

Thank You, Thank You and Thank You!

I really want to thank you for the support during this last year! I want to thank you for posting a comment here or for giving feedback about the content of this blog! I’ve reached 100K visits during 2011, and that means that Drools & jBPM5 are getting better and better! I hope to be able to double that number on 2012!

I wish you all Happy New Year and I promise you that I will stay active in the community! Stay tuned because 2012 will be a great year for these projects and all the community around them!

Salaboy – 2011

Covered Topics

The following list contains all the topics that I consider that must be covered by a book titled jBPM Developer Guide:

• Theoretical Background on BPM
• BPM related topics, technologies and disciplines (SOA, EDA, ESB, BRMS)
• BPM Systems Structure
• BPMN 2.0 Specification Introduction, Why it is important
• WS-HT Specification
• Deep dive into Human Interactions and the Human Task Component
• How jBPM5 is compared with traditional BPM Systems
• jBPM5 Initial Approach – Testing Framework
• jBPM5 Internals
• jBPM5 Tooling
• Domain Specific Activities + Repository
• How jBPM5 is related to Drools and how the can work together to model complex business scenarios
• How jBPM5 share mechanisms with Drools
• How jBPM5 can be integrated with traditional software components and mechanisms (distributed caches, graph oriented databases, messaging systems, etc)
• How jBPM5 can be used with Drools Fusion
• Different options to architect your application around jBPM5 & Drools
• Changes from the previous version jBPM3/jPDL – Migration path
• <<ADD YOURS HERE -> Please post a Comment>>

I will be updating this list of topics based on your comments. But before posting please keep the following points in mind in order to suggest extra topics:

• I cannot include all the topics that I want
• A book never covers all the existing topics, this jBPM5 Developer Guide doesn’t aim to be a jBPM5 Bible
• All the proposed topics must include examples that will be developed along the book
• The book try to cover all the theoretical background needed to help you to understand and tackle new and uncovered problems. I prefer to include the guidelines and make focus on design patterns instead of covering all the possible implementations and technical solutions.
• The book should start simple, with simple examples that morph in more complex scenarios. I cannot cover advanced topics, like for example clustering or distributed transactions if I don’t spend a chapter describing why and when you need to think about those topics. For this example, both clustering and distributed transactions are generic technical topics that can be covered by other books or projects documentation. I will include in this version of the book all the necessary references to cover such topics.
• This book is not just about jBPM5 it must cover and introduce Drools & Drools Fusion to an intermediate level

As I mention, I really appreciate any comments on this. I will try to advertise this post as much as I can, but if you can help me spreading the word I can provide a better reading material for all of you!

Keep in mind the fact that I wanna publish this book on Q1 2012, so the sooner you post more chances do you get to get included in the book.

Merry Xmas & Happy New Year for everyone! - Salaboy 2011

Slides

Drools & jBPM5 Boot Camp 2011

Enjoy!

Here is the flyer

JUGAR 1 de Noviembre

Slides

Notes

The cool thing is that I don’t need to add the speaker notes because Carole-Ann write a review about my session with the description about the Demo app!

You can find the post here: http://techondec.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/rulesfest-2011-mauricio-salatino-rules-processes-and-complex-event-processing/

Thank you all! specially @ilesteban and @calcacuervo that work with me to create and code the demo application!

Rules Fest

I’m getting ready for the event and I will be publishing my presentations and a couple of posts to gather feedback about some ideas that I want to share during the event.

Here are some reference links where you can find more information about the event and the required information to register yourself.

Rules Fest Home Page: http://rulesfest.org/html/home.html

Bootcamps Agenda: http://blog.athico.com/2011/10/drools-jbpm-boot-camp-healthcare-focus.html

List of speakers: http://rulesfest.org/html/speakerBios.html

Notice the list of speakers, there are some very well known and respected people there: Dr. Charles Forgy, James Owen , Mark Proctor, Paul Vincent, Dr. Andrew Ng, Carole-Ann Matignon, etc

Help us to spread the word: http://www.dzone.com/links/r/drools_jbpm_boot_camp_healthcare_focus_san_franci.htm

I hope to see you all there! If you are interested in Drools and jBPM5 and you can’t assist let us know via twitter @salaboy

Agenda

This was the agenda of the event. I personally like the idea of having two concurrent tracks

It was a great time to meet good friends and enjoy the good weather in Brazilia!

Agenda

Slides

I’m sharing here the slides that I’ve used in during the event. I hope next year I can continue sharing the concepts behind Drools and jBPM5 event further.

Enjoy!

Module #2: Drools 5 and jBPM5 Architectural Overview

The agenda of this module looks like:

• Core Components
• Drools Main Modules
• Possible Architectures
• Demos

Slides