Ideas for further development
There are many avenues for further development that could be explored with jBPM: in fact, there are as many variations as there are implementation business scenarios. In this section, we will present a few ideas for taking jBPM further, leaving it up to the reader to decide which are worth further investigation and experimentation.
Breaking up the process into phases using superstates
JBoss jBPM supports the notion of process "superstates", which we can use to split up our long process into process phases. This can be very useful when we want to report on the status of a process instance: rather than having to tie down the instance to a single node, we can report back that the instance is in the "such and such phase".
For example, we might want to break up our "Produce music products" process into four phases, such as:
Band formation
Band development
Album recording
Album production
In terms of the JPDL syntax we use to achieve this, we define superstate nodes in...
