Local History support in jBPM Designer

We have added a new and very useful feature to jBPM Designer – Local History support.

Local History automatically stores your process model information to the browser using HTML5 Web Storage on a preset interval. This allows you to

- Be able to restore previous versions of your model even if you did not / forgot to save your model.

- Be able to restore your work in cases your computer/ browser crashes, or you go offline.

- View all changes in your process between model saves.

- Have more assurance that your work will not get lost.

So let’s see what this looks like (click on the images below to enlarge). Description of the features are contained within the images.

Local History Menu

View Local History Entries for your process model

View the Process Image for each entry

Restoring an entry from the Local History

Configuring Local History via xml

We would like to thank our community contributor Gábor Farkas for his idea for this new feature as well as the initial commit for it. Gábor is a Java EE developer at Doctusoft Ltd and has been involved with the jBPM community for a while now – Thanks Gábor!

Using jBPM Designer in IE

Eric D. Schabell has written a great article that describes how to set up the jBPM Designer to be used on Internet Explorer. This setup is needed because of traditionally bad support for SVG and JavaScript in IE. With this the jBPM Designer is supported on all major browsers.

How Guvnor and Designer talk to each other – great post by Marco Rietveld

Marco Rietveld, one of the core developers working on jBPM and Drools has posted a really nice summary of the “behind-the-scenes” communication of jBPM Designer and Drools Guvnor. He also writes about the ongoing work for jBPM Designer to have its local persistence storage which would allow it to be used as a stand-alone BPMN2 modeller as well as still be able to utilize alternative storage options such as Drools Guvnor.

jBPM Designer 2.4.0.Beta1 released

jBPM Designer 2.4.0.Beta1 has been released and is available for download on SourceForge.

This release includes a number of bug fixes and the experimental BPM Simulation feature which we continue to improve upon. We will have at least one more Beta release before 2.4.0.Final to allow the community to give us as much feedback as possible especially on process simulation.

 

Two great blog posts on jBPM

Branislav Cavlin strikes again with two great blog posts on jBPM

1. Why use jBPM and Drools

2. Displaying jBPM diagram of the current process

 

Make sure to check them out!

Business Process Simulation in jBPM Designer

I’m very happy to blog about a new and exciting feature we have added to the jBPM Designer: Business Process Simulation.

This is still an experimental feature and subject to changes, so community input is very important. Business Process Simulation allows you to to simulate your process model, and view helpful simulation results that can guide you to improve your model as well as be able to better understand it and describe it to your peers and/or customers.

 
The below video showcasts Business Process Simulation in Designer as it is now. Make sure to watch it and give your feedback by either posting your questions/opinions here or hit us up on the jBPM user mailing list, IRC, or the jBPM forum.

Some important features of jBPM Simulation in Designer:

* Use of the BPS (Business Process Simulation) specification

* Simulation engine is based on jBPM 5 (of course )

* Easy to work with and extend

You can start using this new feature now by building the jBPM Designer from source. To do that run:

git clone https://github.com/droolsjbpm/jbpm-designer.git

cd jbpm-designer

mvn clean install

and use one of the three different wars generated in the /target directory.

Enjoy

Process and Task Form editing in jBPM Designer

Process and Task Form editing in jBPM Designer is a breeze with many cool features such as:

• Customizable Form Widgets
• Live Preview
• Auto-completion on Process Variables, Globals, Data Objects, Data Inputs/Outputs
• HTML element completion
• Search and Search/Replace
• etc.

In the video below we show off these features and demo the creation of both an HTML and a Mobile process form all using the In-Line Process and Task Form editing ability in jBPM Designer. These features allow you not to be tied to a particular set of form elements and web technologies which you are allowed to use, but give you the ability to decide how your forms should be defined and coded.

Enjoy