JBCNConf slides about jBPM and Vert.x

1. POLYGLOT &
REACTIVE JBPM
Maciej Swiderski - Salaboy
June ‘15

2. WHO ARE WE?
Maciej Swiderski
Mauricio Salatino

3. AGENDA
• jBPM Intro (10 minutes)
• Vert.x in a Nutshell (10 minutes)
• Demo
• Polyglot interactions
• Reactive BPM

4. WHAT IS JBPM?
Pure Java Lightweight Process Engine.
You can embed it in your apps or
infrastructure.
Main Purpose:
• (Micro)Services Orchestration
• Human Workflows support

5. HOW DOES A PROCESS
LOOK LIKE?

6. KNOWLEDGE IS
EVERYTHING (KIE)
• Drools (Rule Engine)
• jBPM (Process Engine)
• Optaplanner (Resource Planning Engine)
• Dashbuilder (Data Analytics & Visualization)
• Uberfire (API to create generic Web IDEs)

7. CORE ENGINE
• Light-weight , Solid, Stable core engine
• Native support for BPMN 2.0
• Automatically/Natively integrated with:
• Rule Engine - Drools Expert
• Complex Event Processing engine - Drools Fusion
• Configurable engine persistence
• Pluggable variable persistence strategies

8. WORKITEMS
• jBPM as a process engine executes steps defined in
the process - commonly known as activities
• jBPM introduces concept of work items - definition
of work to be performed
• Work Items are composed of two parts
• work item definition - allows to define the work
item once and reuse it across projects - this is the
“what”
• work item handler - allows to execute work item
on runtime environment - this is the “how”

9. WHY YOU SHOULD
CARE?
• Decouple “what we do” from “how we do
it”
• Decoupled lifecycle between your
knowledge (process model) and your app
infrastructure
• Error Tracking and Auditing for free

10. RUN YOUR JBPM
• As a Service
• Execution Servers (REST, JMS, SOAP)
• Embedded
• low level API (KIE API)
• services API (CDI, Spring, EJB)
• You can use as much as you need

11. TOOLING
• KIE Workbench (is our Web IDE)
• Authoring (focused on Business Users)
• Runtime (Focused on the day to day
work)
• Monitoring (Focused on exposing Real
Time Data)

12. KIE MODULE (KJAR)
• Defines a package with business assets
• Apache Maven is used to:
• keep unified and standardized structure of the project
• provides dependency management
• simplify artifacts distribution and consumption by other projects
• get rid of any proprietary formats of knowledge packages
• kjars can have dependencies to any other artifacts including other
kjars
• DevOps (Jenkins, Nexus, etc) tools can be used to distribute,
host and manager our Kie Modules

13. • all assets are stored in source
control system - GIT
• web tooling provides access to GIT server:
• via its UI (allows to work on assets,
create repositories, clone repositories,
etc)
• via IDE (allows to clone, pull, push assets)
• via any GIT tool (GUI or CLI) for any
operation GIT supports
REPOSITORY

14. KIE MODULES (DEMO)
GAV: org.jbpm:receive-data:1.0 GAV: org.jbpm:send-data:1.0

15. DEPLOYMENT OF
BUSINESS ASSETS
• It depends on the way jBPM is used
• as a service primary deployment unit is kjar which
is automatically downloaded from Maven if does
not exist locally - identified by GAV (Group, Artifact,
Version)
• embedded within the application
• recommended to rely on kjars as well
• allows to add business assets manually (from any
source - file system, classpath, database, etc)

16. VERT.X IN A NUTSHELL
“Vert.x is a lightweight, high performance
application platform for the JVM that's
designed for modern mobile, web, and
enterprise applications.”

17. VERT.X IN A NUTSHELL
• Polyglot
• use your favorite programming language or mix several to develop
applications
• Simplicity
• make use of asynchronous APIs without too much hassle
• Scalability
• Scales using message passing to efficiently utilize your server cores.
• Concurrency
• Simple actor-like concurrency model frees you from the pitfalls of
traditional multi-threaded programming.

18. VERT.X IN A NUTSHELL
• Verticle
• The packages of code Vert.x executes. Can be written in
various languages (JS, Java, Groovy, etc)
• Module
• Modules can contain multiple verticles, potentially written
in different languages. Modules allow functionality to be
encapsulated and reused
• Vert.x instance
• Verticles run inside a Vert.x instance. A single Vert.x
instance runs inside its own JVM instance

19. VERT.X TOPOLOGY
Vert.x instance
Event bus
Verticle
instance
Verticle
instance
Verticle
instance

20. VERT.X EVENT BUS
• Event bus is the nervous system of Vert.x
• Allow Verticles to communicate with each other
regardless what language they were written in
• Clustered - allows to communicate regardless
where verticles are located (on the network)
• Simple addressing - simple strings no complex
addressing schemes
• Publish/Subscribe and Point to Point messaging

21. JBPM AND VERT.X
• jBPM module for Vert.x
• allows to start instances of Vert.x with jBPM module
dedicated to kjar
• Reactive
• Makes use of clustered event bus to communicate
between instances of jBPM module
• Polyglot
• Allows to use different languages to interact with
running processes

22. JBPM AND VERT.X
• Configurable via json file (receive-data.conf)
{
"containerId" : "org.jbpm:receive-data:1.0",
"managed" : true
}
• Started as zipped module
vertx runzip jbpm-vertx-module-1.0.0-mod.zip -conf
receive-data.conf

23. DEMO OVERVIEW

24. DEMO: POLYGLOT
• Illustrates how jBPM vert.x module can be
used with various languages
• Java Script
• Scala
• Groovy
• Ceylon

25. DEMO: REACTIVE
• Illustrates how jBPM vert.x module makes
use of (clustered) event bus to exchange
information between processes
• Use of WorkItems to realize/execute
send and receive tasks (BPMN2 activities)

26. DEMO: BPM TOOLING
INTEGRATION
• Illustrates how to integrate with existing
jBPM tooling to keep track of what is going
on with processing managed by jBPM
vert.x module instance

27. DEMO: BPM TOOLING
INTEGRATION

28. DEMO: SCALABILITY
• Illustrates how easy it is to put up more
instances of given kjar to handle increased
load

29. CONTACT US, BE PART
OF THE COMMUNITY…
HTTP://MSWIDERSKI.BLOGSPOT.COM
@SALABOY
HTTP://SALABOY.COM
ON IRC (24/7)
IRC.FREENODE.ORG
CHANNELS: #JBPM, #DROOLS

30. QUESTIONS?