Eric D. Schabell: October 2013

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite - installing the Mortgage demo project (video)

JBoss BPM Suite with Mortgage Demo

Just the other day I walked you through the installation of the JBoss BPM Suite Beta 1 product and accompanying mortgage demo application.

It takes a bit of time and massaging to put together a video of this, but today I finished up the first video of walking you through the installation process from scratch. This should get you up and running in just a few minutes.

I also touch on some aspects of the demo after it is pre-loaded with 16 running process instances. I do not cover all the aspects of the product yet, but stay tuned, we will get those out to you soon enough when the final Beta is released.

Enjoy!

Updated: Feb 2012 (Using product GA to install mortgage demo updated).





Wednesday, October 30, 2013

OpenShift Primer workshop at JAX London survives mega storm

I am just back from a few days in the UK where I gave a three hour workshop covering an OpenShift Primer at JAX London.

It is a really nice conference but they had some bad luck, with a storm coming through that the news was calling the 'Battle of Britain' due to extreme high winds (152 kph) and potential flooding.

It also resulted to all trains being suspended outside of the city of London, which was in effect until around 0900 hours in the morning.

My session started with around 10 attendees, while there were 30 registrations, they started to trickle in later in the morning when the trains began running. I ended up with 16 people in the room after the second hour.

I have put the workshop online:



Here are a few shot to give you impressions of both the storm and the workshop:




Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite - get rocking with the all new Mortgage Demo


This week for the current Red Hat customers we have released the Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite Beta1. A milestone release on the way to a final version 6 release.

Without going into details that will be presented upon a final Beta release announcement soon, I wanted to give customers with access to the Beta1 release a head start by providing a completely automated setup of the JBoss BPM Suite, with a pre-configured mortgage demo project out of the box.

This project is setup like all my previous JBoss BRMS demos and therefore should be a snap for you to get started with. You just need to obtain the project, download the products from the Customer Portal, and push the start button.

Easy as can be!

For more details here is a bit of a walkthrough to get you on your way, starting with the Github hosted project bpms-mortgage-demo:

Get project
# You will want to clone the project as follows.
#
$ git clone https://github.com/eschabell/bpms-mortgage-demo.git

With this project still based on the Beta releases, the final documentation has not been added, therefore I provide the walkthrough in this article instead. This will be replaced with details quickstart documentation in the project you cloned above in the future, including a slide overview of the project architecture.

For now lets look at the directories and files provided.

Project structure
README.md - contains instructions and details to get started.
init.sh - the script to install and configure products and demo.
installs/ - directory to put the products for this demo, see README file there.
projects/ - directory containing the developer demo project for JBDS import.
docs/ - directory containing eventual demo documentation.
support/ - directory with all supporting files and configurations for installing project.

Once you have cloned this to your machine, you can then go to the Customer Portal and download the JBoss BPM Suite Beta1 product.
Download the last entry for JBoss EAP 6

The file you have downloaded will be called jboss-bpms-6.0.0.Beta1-deployable-eap6.x.zip, you will also need to download JBoss EAP 6.1.0, which can be found in the Customer Portal also.

Install products
# Download & copy to the installs directory. 
# Ensure that this file is executable by running:
#
$ chmod +x installs/jboss-bpms-6.0.0.Beta1-deployable-eap6.x.zip
$ chmod +x installs/jboss-eap-6.1.0.zip

Now you can execute in the project root directory the provided init.sh (or init.bat) file.

Installation output
# Running the installation script gives the following output.
#
$ ./init.sh 

#################################################################
##                                                             ##
##  Setting up the Mortgage Demo                               ##
##                                                             ##
##                                                             ##
##     ####  ####   #   #      ### #   # ##### ##### #####     ##
##     #   # #   # # # # #    #    #   #   #     #   #         ##
##     ####  ####  #  #  #     ##  #   #   #     #   ###       ##
##     #   # #     #     #       # #   #   #     #   #         ##
##     ####  #     #     #    ###  ##### #####   #   #####     ##
##                                                             ##
##                                                             ##
##  brought to you by,                                         ##
##             Babak Mozaffari, Eric D. Schabell               ##
##                                                             ##
##  git@github.com:eschabell/bpms-mortgage-demo.git            ##
##                                                             ##
#################################################################

EAP sources are present...

  - detected target directory, moving on...

  - existing JBoss Enterprise EAP 6 detected...

  - moving existing JBoss Enterprise EAP 6 aside...

Unpacking new JBoss Enterprise EAP 6...

Unpacking JBoss BPM Suite 6.0.0.Beta...

  - enabling demo accounts logins in application-users.properties file...

  - enabling demo accounts role setup in application-roles.properties file...

  - setting up demo projects...

  - setting up standalone.xml configuration adjustments...

  - making sure standalone.sh for server is executable...

Deploying web service that pulls out credit report of customer based on SSN...

You can now start the JBoss BPM Suite with ./target/jboss-eap-6.1/bin/standalone.sh

JBoss BPM Suite 6.0.0.Beta Mortgage Demo Setup Complete.

You will now note that you have a new directory, target/ that contains the JBoss EAP server, an installation of JBoss BPM Suite, and a pre-configured mortgage demo project which you can start as follows.

Start JBoss BPM Suite
# The will run with this startup, installing a maven repository from
# the JBoss BPM Suite in the directory you start it from. You will
# see a 'repository/' directory.
#
$ ./target/jboss-eap-6.1/bin/standalone.sh
JBoss BPM Suite login
Once the product is started you can open a browser window to login to Business Central of the JBoss BPM Suite.

http://localhost:8080/business-central

There are several roles defined and configured for the various possible human task that are part of the mortgage demo.

User roles for demo
  • User erics with password bpmsuite, has all roles and admin rights.
  • User alan with password bpmsuite, has appraiser role.
  • User bob with password bpmsuite, has broker role.
  • User mary with password bpmsuite, has manager role.
For ease of initial use, login as the first user with full rights to use all functionality in the product, which will be shown in the screenshots used for the rest of this post.

After login you will see the initial screen with links to various parts and components of the JBoss BPM Suite. It has been pre-loaded with the mortgage demo so no need to use the Authoring -> Administration menu where you would start to either create a new repository and project, or import an existing one from some Git repository.

We will go straight to the mortgage demo to inspect, build, and deploy our first instance of the process by selecting Project Authoring from the listing on the left of the screen. This will take you to the empty Project Explorer view with the mortgage project pre-selected in the right hand menus. You need to select the Package drop down menu and select the last entry.

This will then load all the existing project artifacts into the Project Explorer business user browser on the left hand side.

You can explore the various assets at your leisure and we leave that exercise to the reader. Please try to remember, this is an early Beta access version and there are issues to be fixed, see the project README.md for more details on what
Project screen
you can expect to encounter.

Now we want to build and deploy the project, so that we can start our very first instance to run through the demo. To do this we need to open the Tools -> Project Editor which will give you the Project Screen that has a Build & Deploy button at the top right corner.

Hitting that button will give a green bar pop-up that says Build successful if all goes well.

Build & deploy project
Now you can open the Process Management -> Process Definitions at the top to get to view your deployed project. You will see a single entry for the MortgageApplication and you can inspect it by clicking on the search spy-glass icon on the right, which provides process details.

The button New Instance at the top can be pressed to deploy a new process, which pops-up with your first form to submit a mortgage application.

Process view
The following data can be filled in to have the application pass through to the Appraiser review task.

Submit form
  • Name: erics
  • Address: somewhere
  • SSN: 123456789
  • Income: 80000
  • Property Sale Price: 50000
  • Down Payment: 30000
  • Amorization: 10
Hit the submit arrow at the bottom of the form and then you can then inspect the process progress, view the task list, and complete tasks as needed.

Pre-loading JBoss BPM Suite with processes
A more interesting option has been provided to get you up and running with 16 process instances being pre-loaded into the JBoss BPM Suite in various states of completion, also giving a populated Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) with the Process & Task Dashboard. 

# Once you have JBoss BPM Suite running, have built and deployed 
# the mortgage project, you can pre-fill the product with 16 
# instances in various states by running the following command.
#
$ java -jar support/jboss-mortgage-demo-client.jar erics bpmsuite

You will then find 16 processes in your Process Management -> Process Instances view, also in the Tasks -> Tasks List views.

Task list, with task being worked on

You can also view a process instance, and drill down into the variables and their values.

View the process variables of an instance

For monitoring you can view the Process & Task Dashboard, especially as you claim and complete tasks from the Tasks List.
Monitoring dashboard (BAM), mock data, completed process



This completes the quick overview, which gets you started on working with the JBoss BPM Suite product.

One final note, the entire demo is running in memory, so if you restart your JBoss BPM Suite, you will lose your process data, instances, etc. Just re-run the jar tooling discussed above to reset your installation.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

JBoss One Day Talk 2013 - Full of JBoss Rock Stars


Today we held the JBoss One Day Talk in Munich today and had a lot of fun. There were a lot of JBoss Rock stars in attendance and it felt a lot like a reunion.

It has also gotten a lot of attention in the local German market, with partners and customers I have met the last few years still coming back every year for more JBoss sessions.

The talk I gave was planned to preview the early JBoss BRMS & BPM Suite products, but ended up walking through them including a few OpenShift deployed project examples of BPM components.

Friday, October 18, 2013

OpenShift Primer - a JBoss workshop coming soon to JAX London 2013

I mentioned that I was invited to give a workshop, three hours on Monday, 28 October at JAX London.

This workshop would be based on my e-book, OpenShift Primer, with a focus of getting you hands on to work with the Cloud technology and a few JBoss middleware examples.

My session is from 0900 - 1230 hrs and I will be joined by Rhys Oxenham, our UK Cloud Guru who will show you some OpenShift magic as well.

So get yourself registered, meet me with your laptop at the assigned room, and we will have us a few hours of fun with OpenShift.

During the workshop I will give away a few copies of the e-book, so be sure to pay attention or you might miss something. ;)

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

JBoss Open Conference 2013 - a day of JBoss Way

Just back from a trip to Madrid, Spain, enjoyed the balmy late summer weather that is typical there and the JBoss Open Conference 2013 with around 200+ attendees for the day. It was a lot of fun, included a nice lunch of local cuisine, and I got the chance to talk with quite a few Spanish customers.

My slides from the session:



Here is an impression of the day.


Monday, October 14, 2013

JBoss OneDayTalk 2013 Coming Soon in Munich

I mentioned previously that I was invited back to this really well done event, where we bombard you with excellent technical speakers and topics around all things JBoss in a single day over three tracks.

Many of my friends from the JBoss world will be there, talking about many different things and here are few highlights:

I will be there giving a glimpse of the future of JBoss Rules & BPM

Join us Wednesday, 23 October for a complete day of JBoss talks in Munich, Germany.

Friday, October 11, 2013

JBoss Open Conference 2013 - The JBoss Way, the added value of Open Source middleware

Next week I start a weekly tour of some of the more fun events we have on in Europe around JBoss middleware.

Next week Tuesday, 15 October where I will be kicking off the JBoss Open Conference 2013 in Madrid, Spain.

There will be a myriad of sessions, demos, and all centered around JBoss topics, included several customers presenting successful cases they implemented. Join us for the following sessions:
  • The JBoss Way  
  • JBoss BPM preview
  • OpenShift and Cloud
  • Two partner case studies
  • JBoss SOA Platform preview
  • JBoss Data Grid preview
  • JBoss education and certification preview
  • "Buggy Car" sweepstakes drawing
You don't want to miss that last one, so join us from 0900 - 1700 hrs at the event in Madrid.