Dublin

Having taken myself over to Dublin for the jBPM Community Day I had, of course, to spend some time exploring this great city.  An early start saw me walking from my hotel into the north west corner of Phoenix Park (Ashtown Gate), the largest city park in Europe.  My taxi driver of the night before had warned me about the craze for ‘power walking’ and yes, here were the female residents of Dublin walking aggressively in Nike in all directions.

Passing the Phoenix monument, entrance to the US embassy and Aras An Uachtarain, I passed by the Papal Cross, numerous tame deer and ended up at the Wellington Monument.  Wellington was one of Dublin’s more famous sons.  Arriving at Ireland’s Museum of Modern Art early, experiencing the quad of this former hospital alone, quiet and with the coolness of the morning air slowly making way for the heat of the day to take a hold, and with the murmur of the city only a block away, was special.

MMA do a great cooked breakfast between 10:30 and 11:30 and following a walk around MMA recently refurbished formal garden I headed past the station to the Collins Barracks.  Here there is a new exhibition about the Irish at war.  This celebrates the habit of Irishmen throughout the ages to fight in other country’s armies.  Fontenoy, in which the Irish took the side of the French against the English and were the deciding factor in a famous victory, is still celebrated by Dublin street names.

Also here was a great exhibit exploring the Easter Uprising in April 1916 and is now interpreted as the ‘tipping point’ towards independence.  The heroism of those intellectual young men who were subsequently executed left a large lump in my throat and the artifacts on display are really incredible and extend the story to the subsequent Civil War.  Pistols used in assassinations, flags raised to celebrate the Republic, clothes warn by those assassinated / executed just makes you stand, reflect and take stock.

Remembrance of the struggle of the Irish for independence from the English is particularly poignant at this time since every lamp-post in Dublin is currently replete with posters urging the Irish to vote yes and no in a forthcoming referendum on the Irish constitution triggered by the European Lisbon Treaty.

I was learning about this part of Irish history for the very first time and wondered why this wasn’t a component of contemporary history education in the UK?

After the barracks I walked via the inner-city improvements made in the Smithfield area of the Jameson’s Distillery (found the square slightly Soviet-esque), through Temple Bar, to the National Museum of Ireland.  The two most impressive exhibits featured items that emerge from Irish bogs: gold hoards and bog-men.  Then around to the National Gallery.  Here the painting of a British Dragoon strolling with his Irish wife and surrounded by an impromptu band of street kids (Military Manoeuvres, Richard Thomas Moynan), or the painting of a poacher shot and being cared for by his wife (The Wounded Poacher, Henry Jones Thaddeus), had the most resonance to me since they seemed to evoke a sense of Ireland in a way that the paintings by the masters upstairs could never do.

jBPM Community Day

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/jbpm-community-day/

Great to be able to attend the very first jBPM Community Day in Dublin last weekend.  The weather was fantastic; clear blue skies, sun and more sun (remember this is Ireland!) and we were catered for in the Guinness Storehouse where the welcome was warm and hospitable.

As usual I was early for an event and got chatting with Tom Baeyens and other members of the jBPM core development team whilst they were setting up!  The centre of gravity for this team is Belgium so it was interesting that Dublin had been chosen for the event but I have to say that the event was well supported from the burgeoning Irish tech community.  Hi to all those that I met.

As well as Ireland there was representation from across Europe, but again I was disappointed at the turn out from the UK at an enterprise open-source software event, or perhaps I just didn’t meet those delegates.  As always the opportunity to network is as important as the arranged programme.

jBPM is undergoing reengineering at the moment so this was an important time to hold the event and to explain to the community what is being done.  Tom is clearly pleased with the emerging results of all this hard work and stressed the innovation and flexibility of the new process virtual machine (PVM) API.  jBPM and other teams are creating process definition executables for the PVM (jBPM’s is jPDL), but it was demonstrated that if one of the off-the-peg activities shipping with jPDL doesn’t fit then it will be straightforward for the developer to ‘roll their own’.  Acknowledging that there is not currently a standard for engine APIs Tom is not so keen that such a standard emerges in the short term.  He believes that jBPM has innovated and hopes to capture the advantages that arise from that.

As always open-source core developers and community members are nice people to hang out with.  Their passion about what they do, a strong belief in openness and transparency, genuine interest in and support for community, and lots of fun mark out open source culture from other ways of doing the business.  Interesting, given BPMs emerging importance to enterprise software architectures and business users, there were no women present.

jBPM is lightweight and embeddable and is installed as a workflow engine in other open source projects such as Alfresco.  The technology is oriented towards asynchronous architectures (which I took to be workflows), rather than web-services orchestration via ESB or automation/integration.

The console is possibly the way business users might first experience jBPM and there are plans in place to improve on what was originally only regarded as a demo of use of the API rather than something intended to be deployed.  Perhaps here lies an opportunity for a student at college looking for a final-year project to create a small name for themselves by designing an improved console - did anyone mention JRuby on Rails?

Paul Browne presented ‘off-topic’ on the drools rules engine.  I came away with a different understanding of rules engines than that I had before I went in and on this point alone the journey was made worthwhile.

Continental Europe seem to a be a strong area for jBPM perhaps because of the projects anchor in Belgium.  A regular meet-up is held in Benelux, so anyone who missed the Community Day and wants to get involved with the community can get along to these sessions.  The next one does look rather good … can I persuade my wife to allow me yet another trip away?

Thanks for the jBPM team for providing me with the excuse for a long overdue visit to Dublin.  Finally regards to my new contacts at Intesys, who humoured me while I pontificated in teh pub about virtual SaaS … more on that on a forthcoming blog post.

Person Paul Browne

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Run my process

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/194/

I came across a BPM on-demand solution yesterday http://www.runmyprocess.com.   This service is, I think, designed ‘restfully’ from the bottom-up.  Certainly it seems oriented towards resources as the process component.  I’m experimenting with the service and looking at how I can integrate hosted Live Forms (http://www.frevvo.com) with a hosted workflow.  I don’t think this is likely to prove too difficult and a technical person would likely get this licked in seconds.  I’ll post about any successes.

The service looks to be quite new: the v1.0 documentation was published last month and I’m the 5th person to register on the forum (but it is in French and that may be a disincentive!).  They are promoting integration with well known SaaS apps like Salesforce, Zoho, 37 signals, and Google, and there are demos showing how to assemble processes to do this.

One thing I’d like the folks at runmyprocess to do is be a bit more explicit about the standards they are following and their architecture.  But the service is using Restlet*.  The process designer looks and feels like BPMN.

I think they need to make it easy to import and export processes.  I don’t think there is any support for XPDL, but that might not be appropriate.  Users need to stay because they want to not because they are locked-in!

I think this service is probably forging the future of BPM for the web.  I expect we’ll see a growing ecosystem of rest-based business style services emerging.  Good luck to runmyprocess (needs a shorthand?).

Runmyprocess is running a competition for projects with the prize of free hosting for a year.

* Awaiting publication of the Restlet book, expected publication date 28th May according to Amazon, but that seemingly hasn’t been met.

Twoorl

Twitter clone in Erlang.

http://yarivsblog.com/articles/2008/05/28/announcing-twoorl-an-open-source-erlyweb-based-twitter-clone/

http://groups.google.com/group/erlyweb/msg/d356e9eebca37183

I think this is interesting, but I haven’t the time to investigate this further.  I think Yariv’s motivation is right in terms of wishing to communicate the positives of Erlang and Erlyweb.  Nice one.

NB: how do you pronounce Twoorl (wouldn’t Twerl work better?).  Oops, just read through the rapidly expanding comments to Yariv’s post: Twoorl is good.

I can’t help but think their is a role for Erlang in creating a BPM engine … I know, I’ve said it before, maybe there are enough of these, but yet …

BPMN 2 XPDL

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/bpmn-2-xpdl/

The topic of process designers that support persistence of the process as XPDL is a common item on forums [here, here, here, ]. Typically the enquirer is seeking a free/open source tool.

I suspect this is because BPMN is an entry point into BPM for business users.  Probably the users do not have a BPM system at work, but they perhaps see that gaining competence in BPMN is going to be useful in the future and therefore see it as a personal development need for them.  Alternatively they might be students, again with no particular engine to design for, but with a wish to explore the technology.  Across the globe the number of users in these categories possibly exceeds the numbers of non-technical users actively designing processes for execution.

Now, if you are going to go to the trouble of learning BPMN you are likely going to draft a few processes that are meaningful and useful to your needs.  Hence, you are likely to want to persist the designs in the expectation that one day, sometime in the future, your organisation might just have an engine to which you could deploy your efforts.

Thus, we see this topic cropping up again and again on the forums.

So, to help, and to also inform my own knowledge and awareness of the market, I thought I would list all the BPMN designers that are free to download and use and provide the facility to save as XPDL.  This list will no doubt be incomplete.  If I’ve missed one then please let me know (see below).

The debate about whether XPDL actually is the best exchange format for BPMN continues, and there are competing visions for BPMN 2.0 and here, but for the business user pragmatism rules, and currently XPDL provides an available solution that is likely to be supported by the vendors into the foreseeable future.

Finally, XPDL is one thing, but what about WYDIWYE - what you draw is what you execute.

BPMN 2 XPDL

Open source:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/JWT_Proposal
They have this functionality on their road map. I don’t think it is implemented just yet.  There is also some collaboration between open source BPMN designers on the Eclipse platform.

Closed source:

http://www.activemodeler.com/AvantageFoundation Kaisha-Tec have a free ‘Home’ edition (for BPM?) that requires registration.

http://www.bizagi.com This product is based on .Net platform, so you need to download and install MS .Net Framework 2.0.  This only flies with Windows.  Website is also hugely irritating, but I guess that’s personal taste.  Free product can be downloaded here.

http://www.sungard.com/expcarnot/ Sungard Infinity Process Workbench.  Eclipse-based.  30-days limited product version available to download following registration.

http://www.tibco.com/devnet/business_studio/default.jsp Tibco Business Studio.  Can be downloaded here following registration and acceptance of license.  Eclipse-based.

http://www.itp-commerce.com/ ITP have an extension for MS Visio, but of course you need to have MS Visio installed to use this, so that doesn’t really fit into the free category.

http://bpms.intalio.com Intalio have XPDL on their roadmap.  Their Eclipse-based designer is easy to install and use, but requires registration.

Fujitsu Interstage and Global 360 Process Sketchpad may have downloadable designers, but I’ve yet to find a link!

There are others I’m sure.  For myself I’m starting to use Tibco’s product to model processes for a software service I’m working on, but I’ll not be deploying to Tibco’s engine.  I’ll switch to and support open source efforts as an ‘early adopter’ as soon as a functional product becomes available.

Jitterbit

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/Jitterbit/

I received an email asking me to take Jitterbit’s forthcoming 2.0 release for a spin - I registered an interest in the project many months ago.  Jitterbit is open source EAI (I guess), probably in the same domain as Pentaho (yeah, I know that’s BI, but it includes ETL) and Talend (amongst others).  I need a good taxonomy, it gets confusing!  But what has intrigued me is the following description in the mail:

“Jitterbit 2.0 features a powerful visual workflow designer that lets you build, manage, and connect your business processes.”

Suggesting that they have BPM “in the large” capability.  I’m downloading as I write this and I hope it’s going to be really obvious what it does … I’m not so smart, so it better make it bleeding obvious.

jBPM Community Day

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/jbpm-community-da

I’m off to the jBPM Community Day in a couple of weeks.  Looking forward to some good crack and some good beer since it is taking place at the Guinness Storehouse.

Anyone travelling down from the North East of England get in touch.  Perhaps we can meet-up and I can convince you why you get involved with open-source-network

Early-stage finance

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/early-stage finance/

Quoted in today’s FT, Jonathan Kestenabaum, CEO of Nesta:

“There is too much ‘drip, drip’ money going into early-stage companies - money that will last for 3 - 6 months before the company is again on a wing and a prayer”.

Here, here.  That reflects my experience to a tee.  By the time I’d aligned myself in the sector and got a team together of engineering PhD’s the first drip had evaporated …

Person Jonathan Kestenabaum

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Intalio User Conference

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/intalio-user-conference/

Intalio, provider of BPMS and the people behind Apache ODE, are holding their first user conference in June.  I’m attending and in some way participating and am looking forward to the experience.

This will be my first visit to the USA, and my first time at a US tech conference.  All new experiences.

Any other UK or Euro based folks attending then please get in touch!

NB, I’ll not be staying at the conference hotel - outside of the price bracket for an interim worker.

“Get Carter” car-park open-day

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/get-carter-car-park-open-day/

The residents of the North East are taking the opportunity to say their last good-byes to the most unlikely of iconic structures, the car-park in the centre of Gateshead.

Demolition hoardings have been erected to surround the car-park and shopping centre curtilage, but there was access to the upper storeys today if you are prepared to que!  How about that, queing in a concrete car-park erected in the ’60s.  I didn’t, being satisfied with my visit to the 7th deck.

For those who haven’t been to Newcastle/Gateshead it is difficult to describe how imposing the structure is, perched high-up above the Tyne valley close to an area called Windmill Hills (yes, that’s where windmills used to be sited in the 18th-century).

Perhaps not the most inspiring of images, but when it’s gone a worthy reminder - 60p to park for an hour on an icon.

The restaurant at the top which never opened featured in the film Get Carter starring Michael Caine.  How much to save the restaurant building, relocate it, and actually open it - on terra-firma this time?  A ‘Planet Hollywood’ for the North East … where the actual building is a part of the experience.