La formation initiale BPM/jBPM/jBPM5

BPM predictions for 2012

What are BPM predictions for 2012 as we stand on the verge of the new year?

There will be a new focus on the technology stack versus the BPM point solution. BPM has such a diverse following that only a solution that works for many can have wide acceptance across business and technology folks.

By  Chris Taylor

Link :BPM predictions 2012

jBPM5 Vs Activiti5

VS

Come on guys/girls/CTOs/CEO/Architects/Developers! there is no battle between jBPM5 and Activiti5. If you are here because you are looking for the right option, I will give you some recommendations to choose one rather than the other. I will not make a detailed comparison between features, instead I will make a more project to project overall comparison (Write me back if you want a feature to feature comparison). I’m not a Red Hat / JBoss or Alfresco employee, so I will express my personal opinion about these two projects and why I decide to write and participate in jBPM5/Drools as a community member.
In this post I will highlight some points about these two projects. However the conclusion is that you can choose either jBPM5 or Activiti5 and they will improve and change the way that you are used to developing applications.

The main similarities between this two projects are:

• BPMN2 process modeling and execution environment
• They are both BPM Systems (implementing the BPM discipline)
• Open Source – ASL (Apache Software Licence)ed
• Both were originally developed by JBoss (it’s not a secret that Activiti5 is jBPM4 design and jBPM5 is Drools Flow code base)
• Maturity, both were written from the scratch and both started about 2 years and a half ago.
• Human Task Life Cycle Management. The only difference between jBPM5 and Activiti5 is that jBPM5 implements the WebService-HumanTask standard to describe the Human Task Management Life Cycle. If you are interested to know about this standard and the advantages of adopting it, you can read the introduction chapter of the WS-HT specification here.
• Both projects uses different flavors of the  Oryx editor for modeling BPMN2 processes. jBPM 5 uses a fork for the Open Source project maintained by Intalio. Activiti5 used a different branch maintained by Signavio.

Now, which are the main differences between them?

• The companies / The business model
• The project leaders / Community
• The goals of the projects
• Future / which one should I choose?

Based on these four points and on your personal/company requirements, you can make a long-term decision about which is the best project for you to adopt.

Disclaimer: if you are a java developer learning new technologies, doing your first applications or trying to understand a BPMS, you can take advantage of this comparison. It’s important to notice that knowing both projects will help you to improve your skills, learn best practices, architectural designs, a new way of developing applications, a cool discipline and a bunch of cool stuff. Go ahead and pick one, when you learn the concepts behind one of them, in order to adopt the other, you have to learn a new API, adapt some concepts and learn wider ones.

The companies / the business behind the projects

Both projects are distributed under the ASL (Apache Software License), from the licensing perspective it is exactly the same. You can use both of them without restrictions. Once again, if you are a developer learning something new, both of them will fit perfectly. If you don’t have too much BPM expertise, both of them will look alike.

My community perception about Red Hat and, as far as I know, the Red Hat/JBoss business is about services, the money comes from selling services and support. If you are thinking about spending your money on Red Hat, you can buy support for the SOA Platform Stack. However, until now you cannot buy support strictly for jBPM. This is probably a great advantage, which means that if you buy support from Red Hat, you will get support for the full stack of middleware. Red Hat is specialized in providing that service.

I worked with Alfresco’s CMS and understood how its community works and the business around CMS, but I’m still confused about their business plans for Activiti5. As a company, they can embed the Activiti5 runtime inside the CMS project as they did with jBPM3, or they can sell services about the BPM System solution.  In the official web page(www.activiti.org), they don’t mention anything about Alfresco selling Activiti5 services. I’m not sure if Alfresco is planning to provide them in the near future.

The project leaders and the community

It’s well known that all the community members who know JBPM4.x history move to Activiti5 based on the similarity of the code base and configurations. So the jBPM 4.x community is the same as in Activiti5.

New adopters are asking a lot of questions about jBPM5 and Activiti5.

The jBPM5 community will be probably populated by jBPM 3.x users that want to have the official support from Red Hat/JBoss plus the new ones that understand the great advantages of using a BPM System on top of a Rule Engine. The Drools Flow community and those who use  it, can easily migrate their application to use the new jBPM5 dependencies. Community migration efforts are already being done and a tool for migration is being developed for those jBPM 3.x users.

You can find some useful links about jBPM5 here:

http://blog.athico.com/2011/01/recent-jbpm-5-blogs-articles-videos-and.html

Please feel free to write me back if you have a specific topic or a set of topics that you want to read about. I really enjoy writing about jBPM5 and Drools, but comparisons are fun too!

Right now, jBPM5 is an independent project separated from Drools but highly integrated with the rule engine. The project leader, Kris Verlaenen, is doing a great job trying to get a first stable release at the end of this month.
On the Activiti5 side both Tom Baeyens and Joram Barrez are doing an excellent job trying to get attention and adoption from their re-branded BPMS.

*add whatever you want here 

Project’s Goals

As far as I know, they have very different perspectives and goals. The Activiti5 team is fighting for adoption, while the jBPM5 team is struggling for improving concepts, giving us a new twist, great features and flexibility.

There is no way to say that one is better than the other when they have different goals in their roadmaps. If you are fighting for adoption, you will focus on conferences, tooling and integration. The project roadmap for adoption has short period releases and stable deliverables.

If your project roadmap includes features that were never developed, long period releases will probably be required. From my point of view Drools Flow was an innovative project built from the scratch to show that the interaction between a rule engine with a BPMS gives richer features and a great degree of flexibility to model real situations.

Right now, jBPM5 is a more ordinary project. A lot of the work that is being done now is about  tooling and demos to show common usage. jBPM5 will look very good in the next few months, after the first stable release.

Future / Which one should I choose?

There is no simple answer. If you are looking for a simple lightweight BPMS both are good. If this is your first experience with a BPMS, no matter what you choose, you will be happy and you will have trouble with both.

If you want to join a community to contribute to these projects both are good. I can’t give an opinion about the Alfresco community, because I’m not so involved but it looks like an active community. From the jBPM5 perspective you will find a pretty active community as well. Right now, as a result of mixing Drools and jBPM3 communities, you will see strong activity in the Forums and in the IRC channel.

The important question here that you may ask to yourself is:

Am I choosing a BPMS for the next couple of years or is it just for a little project?
If the answer of this question is:

• I’m just starting OR I will create a simple web app that shows the basic features OR the application will not be used by a large amount of users OR the application will not be critical for the organization OR we don’t have complex business processes and we don’t have complex business situations, both projects will work well.
• I need to build a middle-sized application that uses business process extensively, this business processes are not so complex (no more than 20 activities each, without too much exceptional branches) and the application is not critical for the company, both projects will work well.
• I need to build a new architecture that gives me the ultimate flexibility to express complex/ real life business scenarios AND I understand the power of a Rule Engine AND I understand the advantages of using it in conjunction with a BPMS (handling in an unified way my business logic and my business processes, using the same APIs, being as declarative as possible), you really need to try jBPM5!  This is not the common case, usually only advanced users that already developed more than one BPM application, notice this kind of advantages. If you don’t know how to leverage the power of a rule engine, both projects will give you the same amount of features. If you analyze the common features of a BPMS, there is no clear advantage between both projects. When you start to understand the power and advantages of the Rule Engine or when you really need a Rule Engine working together with a BPMS,x you clearly know what to choose for the next two years.

Conclusion

As I mention in the post introduction:
You can choose jBPM5 or Activiti5, both will teach you and let you implement the BPM discipline main stages. Both are Open Source and ASL licenced.
If you are not only thinking in adopting a new technology and you already face some BPM implementation with jBPM3/jBPM4 or the old OSWorkflow you probably notice and know the advantages of using a Rule Engine in conjunction with the BPMS. If you are at that point please take a look at jBPM5 and the Drools integration, you will probably be amazed. If you want to take a look at a running application designed using the concept of Rule Engine and BPMS together you can take a look at the following posts. Notice that Drools + jBPM5 offers you a full platform for declarative application programming.  Adding important features like the advantages of a CEP engine(Drools Fusion) and a Centralized Repository for all your business assets (Drools Guvnor).

copyright http://salaboy.com/

MDA is dead, long live AADA

MDA is dead, long live AADA

With recent additions of powerful language structures to the Java platform, the time is ripe for a fresh development methodology. The promise of design techniques - like Waterfall, Spiral, RUP and MDA - for an agile and efficient Object-Oriented development process is within reach.

Features like Annotations, AOP, Generics and IoC bring upon an opportunity to reevaluate our architecture design strategy. In this article I will introduce AADA (Annotations and Aspects Driven Architecture) a compelling alternative to MDA. AADA is a refactoring-oriented design methodology that effectively eliminates the need for massive code generation.

Article : http://freddy33.blogspot.com/2006/01/mda-is-dead-long-live-aada.html

Convention-over-Configuration in an Agile World

As developers, we spend an inordinate amount of time writing “glue code”. We write code to transform database rows to domain objects… domain objects to view-models or DTOs… We write code to configure inversion of control containers and wire dependencies together. We write code to style our UIs and respond to UI events. Wouldn’t it be nice if this could happen automagically for us? This session will look at using convention-based approaches using Fluent NHibernate and Castle Windsor to reduce the amount of repetitive code and accelerate application development.

Convention-over-Configuration in an Agile World

Comment les médias sociaux ont changé la publicité

Il est vrai que les médias sociaux ont redistribué les cartes dans le domaine de la publicité. D’abord parce qu’aujourd’hui les internautes passent le plus clair de leur temps sur ces réseaux. Ensuite, et c’est la conséquence logique, parce que les professionnels du marketing ont du changer à leur tour leurs stratégies pour suivre le mouvement.
En effet, les personnes connectées passent 22.5% de leur temps sur les médias sociaux, 9.8% sur les jeux en ligne, 7.6% à consulter leur boite mail et 4.5% du temps à regarder des vidéos.
D’autre part, les spots télé, radio et papier sont en train de perdre du terrain devant la publicité en ligne qui a joui de 23, 24 puis de 34% du total des pubs durant respectivement le 1er, 2ème et 3ème trimestres de 2011.
Et enfin, le budget des réseaux sociaux a augmenté pour 43% d’entre eux et est resté le même pour 36%, ce budget dépassera le double durant les 3 prochaines années selon les prévisions.

Source : http://www.nuwave-marketing.com/comment-les-medias-sociaux-ont-ils-change-la-publicite/

Gartner, Inc. highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2012.

 
The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 20.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.
“These top 10 technologies will be strategic for most organizations, and IT leaders should use this list in their strategic planning process by reviewing the technologies and how they fit into their expected needs,” said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner fellow.
“Organizations should start exploratory projects to look at promised candidate technology and kick off a search for combinations of information sources, including social sites and unstructured data that may be mined for insights,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
The top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 include:
Media Tablets and Beyond. Users can choose between various form factors when it comes to mobile computing. No single platform, form factor or technology will dominate and companies should expect to manage a diverse environment with two to four intelligent clients through 2015. IT leaders need a managed diversity program to address multiple form factors, as well as employees bringing their own smartphones and tablet devices into the workplace.
Enterprises will have to come up with two mobile strategies – one to address the business to employee (B2E) scenario and one to address the business to consumer (B2C) scenario. On the B2E front, IT must consider social goals, business goals, financial goals, and risk management goals. On the B2C front, which includes business to business (B2B) activities to support consumers, IT needs to address a number of additional issues such as surfacing and managing APIs to access enterprise information and systems, integration with third-party applications, integration with various partners for capabilities such as search and social networking, and delivery through app stores.
Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces. The user interface (IU) paradigm in place for more than 20 years is changing. UIs with windows, icons, menus, and pointers will be replaced by mobile-centric interfaces emphasizing touch, gesture, search, voice and video. Applications themselves are likely to shift to more focused and simple apps that can be assembled into more complex solutions. These changes will drive the need for new user interface design skills.
Building application user interfaces that span a variety of device types, potentially from many vendors, requires an understanding of fragmented building blocks and an adaptable programming structure that assembles them into optimized content for each device. Mobile consumer application platform tools and mobile enterprise platform tools are emerging to make it easier to develop in this cross-platform environment. HTML5 will also provide a long term model to address some of the cross-platform issues. By 2015, mobile Web technologies will have advanced sufficiently, so that half the applications that would be written as native apps in 2011 will instead be delivered as Web apps.
Contextual and Social User Experience. Context-aware computing uses information about an end-user or objects environment, activities, connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end-user or object. A contextually aware system anticipates the user’s needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Context can be used to link mobile, social, location, payment and commerce. It can help build skills in augmented reality, model-driven security and ensemble applications. Through 2013, context aware applications will appear in targeted areas such as location-based services, augmented reality on mobile devices, and mobile commerce.
On the social front, the interfaces for applications are taking on the characteristics of social networks. Social information is also becoming a key source of contextual information to enhance delivery of search results or the operation of applications.
Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as sensors and intelligence are added to physical items such as consumer devices or physical assets and these objects are connected to the Internet. The vision and concept have existed for years, however, there has been an acceleration in the number and types of things that are being connected and in the technologies for identifying, sensing and communicating. These technologies are reaching critical mass and an economic tipping point over the next few years. Key elements of the IoT include:

• Embedded sensors: Sensors that detect and communicate changes are being embedded, not just in mobile devices, but in an increasing number of places and objects.
• Image Recognition: Image recognition technologies strive to identify objects, people, buildings, places logos, and anything else that has value to consumers and enterprises. Smartphones and tablets equipped with cameras have pushed this technology from mainly industrial applications to broad consumer and enterprise applications.
• Near Field Communication (NFC) payment: NFC allows users to make payments by waving their mobile phone in front of a compatible reader. Once NFC is embedded in a critical mass of phones for payment, industries such as public transportation, airlines, retail and healthcare can explore other areas in which NFC technology can improve efficiency and customer service.

App Stores and Marketplaces. Application stores by Apple and Android provide marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of applications are available to mobile users. Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus. With enterprise app stores, the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support entrepreneurs. Enterprises should use a managed diversity approach to focus on app store efforts and segment apps by risk and value.
Next-Generation Analytics. Analytics is growing along three key dimensions:

1. From traditional offline analytics to in-line embedded analytics. This has been the focus for many efforts in the past and will continue to be an important focus for analytics.
2. From analyzing historical data to explain what happened to analyzing historical and real-time data from multiple systems to simulate and predict the future.
3. Over the next three years, analytics will mature along a third dimension, from structured and simple data analyzed by individuals to analysis of complex information of many types (text, video, etc…) from many systems supporting a collaborative decision process that brings multiple people together to analyze, brainstorm and make decisions.

Analytics is also beginning to shift to the cloud and exploit cloud resources for high performance and grid computing.

In 2011 and 2012, analytics will increasingly focus on decisions and collaboration. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.

Big Data. The size, complexity of formats and speed of delivery exceeds the capabilities of traditional data management technologies; it requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone. Many new technologies are emerging, with the potential to be disruptive (e.g., in-memory DBMS). Analytics has become a major driving application for data warehousing, with the use of MapReduce outside and inside the DBMS, and the use of self-service data marts. One major implication of big data is that in the future users will not be able to put all useful information into a single data warehouse. Logical data warehouses bringing together information from multiple sources as needed will replace the single data warehouse model.
In-Memory Computing. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the memory hierarchy in servers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Besides delivering a new storage tier, the availability of large amounts of memory is driving new application models. In-memory applications platforms include in-memory analytics, event processing platforms, in-memory application servers, in-memory data management and in-memory messaging.

Running existing applications in-memory or refactoring these applications to exploit in-memory approaches can result in improved transactional application performance and scalability, lower latency (less than one microsecond) application messaging, dramatically faster batch execution and faster response time in analytical applications. As cost and availability of memory intensive hardware platforms reach tipping points in 2012 and 2013, the in-memory approach will enter the mainstream.

Extreme Low-Energy Servers. The adoption of low-energy servers — the radical new systems being proposed, announced and marketed by mostly new entrants to the server business —will take the buyer on a trip backward in time. These systems are built on low-power processors typically used in mobile devices. The potential advantage is delivering 30 times or more processors in a particular server unit with lower power consumption vs. current server approaches. The new approach is well suited for certain non-compute intensive tasks such as map/reduce workloads or delivery of static objects to a website. However, most applications will require more processing power, and the low-energy server model potentially increases management costs, undercutting broader use of the approach.

Cloud Computing. Cloud is a disruptive force and has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services. Oracle, IBM and SAP all have major initiatives to deliver a broader range of cloud services over the next two years. As Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offering, and these traditional enterprise players expand offerings, users will see competition heat up and enterprise-level cloud services increase.

Enterprises are moving from trying to understand the cloud to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds. Hybrid cloud computing which brings together external public cloud services and internal private cloud services, as well as the capabilities to secure, manage and govern the entire cloud spectrum will be a major focus for 2012. From a security perspective new certification programs including FedRAMP and CAMM will be ready for initial trial, setting the stage for more secure cloud computing. On the private cloud front, IT will be challenged to bring operations and development groups closer together using “DevOps” concepts in order to approach the speed and efficiencies of public cloud service providers.