Portugal JUG (PTJUG) - a night of jBPM and OpenShift

As previously posted, I was in Lisbon last week to meet with the Portugal Java User Group (PTJUG) and present on the jBPM5 project followed by OpenShift.

The flight into town is worth mentioning as you come into the city itself, making for some really spectacular views of castles, old churches and just beautiful Portugese architecture stacked against the hills of Lisbon. It was also great to come from the colder Netherlands into a summer temperature of 16 degrees (for my home location, that is summer)!

Bull fighting ring

The location was the Instituto Supirior Technico, situated right close to the center. I had a bit of time to get ready so on the advice of my hotel I walked two blocks down the road in the lovely summer like sunshine to view a bull fighting ring. Set the mood for the event session!

I arrived at the event location to be greeted by a group from the PTJUG and we got settled in the room. Before we started they made sure I met each and everyone that was attending, from consultants, engineers, developers, analysts, managers and even a professor. It was a very relaxed and sociable group of guys (not to forget, the single lady that showed up to claim the first ever OpenShift Ladies T-shirt!). We had a total of ~30 people show for the talks, but I forgot to actually count. I did notice that the 40 OpenShift t-shirts I brought did not survive the end of the event!

jBPM 5
We talked jBPM first, with quite a bit of interaction as there were users with experience in jBPM3 in the audience. We demo'ed the round tripping, jBPM console, the diverse IDE tooling support and looked extensively at the web designer. I also provided a peak at the early access bits of the upcoming JBoss Business Rules Management System product that will contain the newer jBPM5 components.

There were some questions around the various integrations and an interesting request to provide an open source evaluation of the new jBPM5 to place along side the existing one on the Workflow Patterns site. We also spent time discussing and digging into the jBPM Migration project as a preview of what the migration possibilities might be moving forward.

JBoss Brings More Power to your Business Processes (PTJUG) 

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell

OpenShift
After a short break we moved on to the OpenShift session. This talk was about getting the audience into the session, so I pushed actually from the start of the entire event to have them sign up for an OpenShift account with their laptops and to follow along. We walked through the Express setup, client tools and focused a lot in the demo section on the Java tooling provided by JBossTools project. This was enforced by doing the demo through both Eclipse with JBossTools and with JBoss Developer Studio 5. This early release version integrates the OpenShift wizards and tooling to get you started.

An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your Code into the Cloud (PTJUG)

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell

The event concluded with a nice discussion around the possibilities of clustering Express instances, how to interact between two nodes of Express and what the advantages of Flex would be. Some of the audience had already used OpenShift for personal projects. I was asked if I wanted to come back before the end of the year to talk about OpenShift updates as the Open Sourcing and exposing the cartridge API will be of great interest for this group.

It was a great time with experiences Java users, jBPM users and the interaction was nice during both talks. I really enjoyed this event and look forward to meeting up with the PTJUG anytime in the future!