jBPM from the trenches - status of jBPM process rework

It has been almost two months since I last posted on the progress of our jBPM process rework. We have solved the composite business service issues and have since completed the following steps:

• Business logic has been encapsulated into services and pushed down into the SOA layer.
• Discussion on composite business services has been initiated for our SOA layer.
• A first process state node is being setup with complete unit testing
• The state-proxy is being integrated into the process layer.

The tasks left to be done in the coming year (we are winding down for 2008):

• Transitional actions are being brought up into process steps
• Core process steps are being black-boxed so that you can fill them with any eventual project specific sub-flow definitions as needed.

This week we have started the implementation of a custom jBPM class loader to facilitate running multiple projects on a single jBPM engine where we want to access different service versions. I will post more on this soon, after implementing our design and proving it works. I can say we have decided against having it link into maven to solve a projects dependencies.

That's it for now from the trenches.