Tom continues to update the world with jBPM updates – in this case, using jBPM 4 and Drools to blend process and rules. His updates definitely play to the technical audience rather than the business – but I don’t find that too surprising in the open source world.  From a technical perspective, it is certainly interesting.  Proof that these memes seem to emerge on their own : Bruce Silver has also recently posted on rules and BPM (part 2 of a previous effort).

At some point I look forward to digging into jBPM more thoroughly, and now that it supports BPMN 2, I’m more inclined to make the time, its starting to get interesting for the kinds of problems we look at.  However, I still fear that it is just a bit too technical in terms of what it requires of process authors still.

A previous update confirms that jBPM now supports BPMN 2.0, as of version 4.0.  This is a niche I think open source can help fill – potentially fully implementing a spec that probably won’t be fully implemented by any commercial software vendor.  (Filling out the corners is just the kind of academic exercise that seems to get tackled by *someone* within an open source effort)

Pretty interesting update from Joram Barrez on jBPM – looks like it now supports BPMN2.0. (or, more accurately, it will come January 1st).

Its a pretty interesting look under the hood of one of the top open-source solutions in the BPM space.  The BPMN2 implementation uses the jBoss PVM (process virtual machine) to execute the BPMN, rather than transforming BPMN into BPEL  or JPDL or some other XML format.

jBPM also gives the developer a good Java programmatic interface into the BPM engine implementation (and, the processes it runs).

This sort of development effort does make me wonder if, eventually, we’ll have a fairly standardized open-source BPMN engine with commercial products that incorporate it in different ways (picture Apache or jBoss as examples, or the WebKit in the browser world).  Hard to say if jBPM (or key pieces like PVM) will turn out to be that open-source engine of choice, but at least from the blog posts it seems like they’re taking an intelligent and focused approach.

I’ve been a skeptic of XPDL as the pre-eminent format for BPMN-drawn Models, but I’ve also been encouraged by Keith Swenson’s efforts to prove that it could be the de facto standard for BPMN model exchanging.

But it looks like my judgment that XPDL would only catch on with vendors like Lombardi (who have been beating the drum for BPDM and BPMN2 for some time) only if BPMN 2.0 didn’t sufficiently address the interchange problem might be a little off.  Lombardi just announced that its Blueprint July ‘09 release supports XPDL!  It could be that Lombardi is voting with its feet – perhaps BPMN2 doesn’t seem to solve the problem(s) they were hoping it would with regard to model interchange.  Or, perhaps they see XPDL interchange as the Right Now solution, and don’t see an advantage in waiting on BPMN2 support. After all, not only would Lombardi have to build the BPMN 2 export/import functionality, they would then have to wait on myriad other modeling tools to pick up the baton in order for there to be anyone to “interchange” with.

By picking up XPDL support, Lombardi Blueprint can now exchange models with a host of other modeling tools listed on the XPDL vendor site (perhaps Lombardi will now be added to the site).  Bruce Silver has already assessed portability between Blueprint and Process Modeler for Visio.

Update:  more info from Keith Swenson on his blog, regarding exporting from Blueprint and importing into Fujitsu’s Interstage BPM.

Sandy Kemsley posted a good recap of a webinar on BPMN 2.0 by Robert Shapiro.  Its a good writeup, and must have been a pretty good webinar.

Another link from Sandy – I’m not sure how I feel about this – a book on BPMN, that (I think) is intended to read like a novel… I don’t know whether to be afraid, or very afraid…

Bruce previously had a good post on the 5 things to like most about BPMN 2.  Now he’s back with the 5 things that were left out that might be the most disappointing.  Perhaps disheartening, but not completely surprising, given how difficult it is to pull these kind of specs together.  Hopefully they’ll keep at the revisions on BPMN and react to the feedback once BPMN 2.0 is approved.

Bruce Silver has a nice article on BPMInstitute.org about the 5 things to like about BPMN 2.0 (he doesn’t discuss the 5 things not to like – perhaps material for a future post?!).

OMG votes on the proposal in June, but the history on OMG’s voting on BPM-related standards has typically been that it takes longer than I expect for things to get finalized.  I won’t be shocked if final approval drags out a bit longer.

Interestingly, 4 of the 5 things Bruce mentions address weaknesses that at least one pureplay BPM vendor addresses already in their product (implementing more than what BPMN 1.0 spec requires).  Let’s hope there’s more than 5 things to love about BPMN 2.0 – vigorous vendor adoption would be on my wish list!

Bruce Silver put an update on the BPMN 2.0 specification he’s been participating in, and how its progressing. He pointed out a couple things that I happen to agree with, and if you do too, probably pays to be commenting on Bruce’s blog or elsewhere to help generate some public support for his commentary.

First, the focus on a different notion of “executable” BPMN – where all the attributes necessary for executing are available.  That’s not a bad notion – I don’t think anyone is necessarily “against” it.  But as Bruce points out, we need for BPMN models to conform without being executable – to support use cases for BPMN that are primarily modeling and not execution as schema-valid models (not all processes will be executed).

Its a good read, hope we can hear more about the process before the final submission (or after, as the case may be).  Participating in these efforts is tough for independent consultancies like Bruce because you don’t get paid for the work.  For a big company, the contributors may get paid to participate, or they may do it on their own time.  For independents, it hits the bottom line if the work encroaches on work-hours.  Kudos to Bruce for making the time to assist with BPMN 2.0, and I’m sure the spec will be the better for his input.