JBoss jBPM concepts

JBoss jBPM is built around the concept of waiting. That may sound strange given that software is usually about getting things done, but in this case there is a very good reason for waiting. Real-life business processes cut across an organization, involve numerous humans and multiple systems, and happen over a period of time. In regular software, the code that makes up the system is normally built to "do all these tasks as soon as possible". This wouldn't work for a business process, as the people who need to take part in the process won't always want or be able to "do their task now".

The software needs some way of waiting, until the process actor is ready to do their activity. Then once they have done their activity, the software needs to know what is the next activity in the chain and then wait for the next process actor to get round to doing their bit.

The orchestration of this sequence of "wait, work, wait, work" is handled by the JBoss jBPM engine. The jBPM engine...