Processing with a Camel - How To Integrate JBoss BPM and JBoss Fuse

With the release of the newer versions of the products JBoss BPM Suite 6.1 and JBoss Fuse 6.1.1, we wanted to revisit the integration demo.

We have brought the JBoss BPM Suite and JBoss Fuse Integration Demo project up to date with these latest releases.

These products are used to get you started integrating your BPM projects with your Apache Camel architecture in minutes.

This project provides an automated installation (repeatable) in minutes where you get JBoss BPM Suite running on an instance of JBoss EAP and a separate instance of JBoss Fuse in its very own Karaf container.

There are plans to expand this demo project with various integration scenarios or use cases, but for now we start with just a single story around using a JBoss Fuse camel route to interact with a rules and process project deployed onto JBoss BPM Suite.

Background

External BPM customer evaluation process

This demo is brought to you in part by our very own Christina Lin who is the JBoss Technology Evangelist that focuses on JBoss Fuse & messaging products. There will be more expansion and if you have a use case you would like to see then just let us know.

The project can be found on github and has documentation to get you up and running in minutes.

Demo details

Upon starting the server you will find a JBoss BPM Suite setup with the Customer Evaluation project ready for you to inspect, build and deploy for use by the JBoss Fuse camel route we will deploy.

A new container in JBoss Fuse

The JBoss Fuse component of this demo consists of setting up a new container to deploy our camel route into, where we then watch messages get processed live in the management console as we push them into the waiting queue. Each message will trigger an external call out to the deployed BPM process to evaluate our customer.

Installing and running

The following steps will get you up and running in a matter of minutes with this fully automated and repeatable demo:

1. 

   Camel route with visual message count

   Download and unzip.
2. Add products to installs directory.
3. Run 'init.sh' or 'init.bat'.
4. Start the JBoss BPM Suite server, login, build and deploy JBoss BPM Suite process project at http://localhost:8080/business-central (u:erics/p:bpmsuite1!).
5. Add fabric server passwords for Maven Plugin to your ~/.m2/settings.xml file the fabric server's user and password so that the maven plugin can login to the fabric.

    <!-- Login for fabric repo -->
   <servers>
     <server>
       <id>fabric8.upload.repo</id>
       <username>admin</username>
       <password>admin</password>
     </server> 
   </servers> 
   

6. Start Fuse Server and start up fabric in fuse console:

    fabric:create --wait-for-provisioning 
   

7. Deploy simple route from projects/brms-fuse-integration/simpleRoute:

    mvn fabric8:deploy
   

8. Login to Fuse management console at: http://localhost:8181 (u:admin/p:admin).
9. Connect to root container with login presented by console (u:admin/p:admin)
10. Create container name c1 and add BPMSuiteFuse profile (see screenshot below)
11. 

    Looking to Automate your business?

    Trigger camel route by placing support/data/message.xml files into target/jboss-fuse-6.1.1-redhat-412/instances/c1/src/data folder (rename this message on copy for multiple runs)
12. Enjoy the demo!

This upgrade was made possible in part by the good work of Jeff Bride, a colleague at Red Hat that works wonders in his day job.

We hope you enjoy this updated demo showcasing JBoss Fuse integration with JBoss BPM Suite.

Slides from Online PEX Webinar - A Guide to Modern BPM Tools

As mentioned previously, today I presented a webinar Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite based webinar to show you everything you would want to know about our JBoss BPM Travel Agency solution.

This event was hosted by PEX Process Excellence Network and you should be able to view a recording here.

I hope you enjoyed the tour of our JBoss BPM Suite Travel Agency and that you are now able to understand the benefits of using JBoss Automate solutions.

A Guide to Modern BPM Tools

All across the Internet you will find references to solutions, offerings, and products that try to align with business process management (BPM) solutions.

Whether you’re a Business Analyst or in IT strategy, this webinar will illustrate how easy it is to model and automate business processes with modern BPM tools in the travel industry.

If you are talking to an airline, a baggage handler, a bookings agency or anyone in between, they all have one thing in common. They are dealing with complex business processes that often need to combine rules, events, resource planning, and processes.

You’ll take a deep look into a sample solution for this industry, simulating a travel agency booking system with:

• Service integration
• Multiple tasks
• Complex BPM elements and
• Rule-based fraud detection for payment processing

You will leave with an advanced overview of the capabilities of the Red Hat® JBoss® BPM Suite.

Feel free to reach out if you have questions or comments, I always make time to chat with interested users.

JBoss BPM Suite 6.1 welcomes Business Resource Planner to the family

We are happy to share that with the recent release of Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6.1 product, there is a new fully supported component available to you for optimizing your business resources.

Have a planning problem?

Have a complex resource issues?

JBoss BPM Suite includes powerful new tools for optimizing and scheduling business resources. Learn how the Business Resource Planner can tackle a wide range of planning problems, from delivery routing to shift scheduling and even managing compute resources in the cloud.

Look no further than the Business Resource Planner which is highlighted in the video below.

If you still don't believe this is great stuff, then see what the press is saying around this featured component Business Resource Planner.

Note that this component is also available in the Red Hat JBoss BRMS 6.1 product which is a sub-set of the JBoss BPM Suite product.

Solve optimization and scheduling problems with business resource planning

If you are looking to get started with this technology or any part of the JBoss BPM Suite, be sure to check out the free online workshop hosted in the OpenShift Online Cloud.

Stay tuned as more is added to the start we have made with the Business Resource Planner workshop.

Japanese translation (日本語訳)

Online Free PEX Webinar - A Guide to Modern BPM Tools

Next week on the 29th of April I will be giving a live online webinar around the virtues of Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite.

This event is being hosted by PEX Process Excellence Network and you should register here.

A Guide to Modern BPM Tools

All across the Internet you will find references to solutions, offerings, and products that try to align with business process management (BPM) solutions.

Whether you’re a Business Analyst or in IT strategy, this webinar will illustrate how easy it is to model and automate business processes with modern BPM tools in the travel industry.

If you are talking to an airline, a baggage handler, a bookings agency or anyone in between, they all have one thing in common. They are dealing with complex business processes that often need to combine rules, events, resource planning, and processes.

You’ll take a deep look into a sample solution for this industry, simulating a travel agency booking system with:

• Service integration
• Multiple tasks
• Complex BPM elements and
• Rule-based fraud detection for payment processing

You will leave with an advanced overview of the capabilities of the Red Hat® JBoss® BPM Suite. 

This FREE webinar will be on: Wednesday, April 29, 2015, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM Eastern

See you there?

Red Hat Taste of Training - Deploying to Red Hat JBoss Fuse

There are often questions asked of me around JBoss Integration & BPM products when people run into me at conferences, events or online.

I have taken many of these questions home with me and they get answered in the form of an article around Tips&Tricks label or maybe a demo project gets created.

I am a teacher, I have a story to tell and you out there are a big part of the path this story takes.

Sometimes a student is just looking for a learning experience that mirrors the classroom, so with that in mind Red Hat has provided a series of free videos that give you a Taste of Training.

This, just under 13 minute video, will teach you how to use Maven to build an application bundle that can be deployed easily to Red Hat JBoss Fuse using the OSGi system available there.

It is based on the course JB421, Camel Development with Red Hat JBoss Fuse.

Enjoy and be sure to check out the other offerings brought to you by Red Hat Training.

3 Must See Sessions For Red Hat Summit 2015

This years Red Hat Summit conference and co-located DevNation event is being held in Boston, Massachusetts on June 23-26th.

I had previously listed the talks and workshops that I had submitted or co-submitted, but wanted to report back on the final status after acceptance (and rejection) letters were received.

The following are three must see sessions I will be presenting, hosting or joining at Red Hat Summit conference this year.

1. Planning not to fail with JBoss Business Resource Optimizer

The saying goes, failing to plan is planing to fail. We don't want to fail, but with the need to accelerate our integration and BPM projects we often have issues with complex resource planning. A roster needs to be planned, beds assigned to patients, a logistics route optimized, cloud instance resource planning to optimize usage of our workloads or even packing solutions for sub-optimal spaces. All these and more will be yours to solve with the help of the Business Resource Optimizer component included with Red Hat JBoss BRMS & BPM Suite products. 

Join us for a few hours, roll up your sleeves and get dirty as we create solutions that plan, organize and optimize.

(lab: to be hosted within the Choose Your Own Adventure series around JBoss labs with Jim Tyrrell, see agenda for location and times)

2. Racing Camel with BPM and JBoss Fuse

Do challenges have you wrestling with integration in your business? Are you aware that you can easily merge your enterprise Camel integration with your business processes? 

This lab will guide you through the creation of a customer care project containing several BPM processes that integrate seamlessly with JBoss Fuse, Camel routes, provide full BAM reporting abilities and manage it all wtih Fuse Fabric. Get ready for a few hours of fun and adventure as you kick the tires, because after all, a Camel has no purpose until there is a process.

(lab: co-submitted with Christina Lin to Red Hat Summit, see agenda for location and time this lab will be running)

3. Meet the Authors

This is a session where the various Red Hat and JBoss authors will be present for a chat, to sign your books or just to hang out with you. 

This is just a small list of some of the experts in the field that have written books around technologies your are passionate about:

• Rob Davies     ActiveMQ in Action 
• Eric D. Schabell     OpenShift Primer
• Adam Miller    Implementing OpenShift 
• Grant Shipley    Learning OpenShift 
• Mike McGrath    Understanding PaaS 
• Andrew Lee Rubinger    Continuous Enterprise Development in Java 
• Claus Ibsen    Camel in Action 
• Bill Burke    RESTful Java with JAX-RS 2.0
• Pradeep Subramainan    Getting Started with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 
• Russell Bryant    Asterisk: The Definitive Guide 
• Ruth Suele / Tom Callaway    Raspberry Pie Hacks 
• Jim Whitehurst    The Open Organization 
• Jason Hibbets    The OpenSource City 
• Shawn Wells / Keith Basil    OpenStack Security Guide 
• Emmanuel Bernard    Hibernate Search in Action 
• Neependra Khare    Docker Cookbook 

Some or all of these authors might be present in this session, so swing on by, I will be there with a few give away copies (codes to download) of my e-book, OpenShift Primer for free!

(see conference agenda for location and times)

See you in Boston in June 2015!

What's New in Red Hat JBoss BRMS & JBoss BPM Suite 6.1 Release

Today it has arrived!

The official release of JBoss BRMS and JBoss BPM Suite 6.1 has brought to you an array of interesting and new functionality.

You can find the products on the Customer Portal for downloading and using today.

Before you get started with all of the content and assets that we have available right from the launch, we wanted to provide an overview.

This article will cover some of the features to be launched in this new version and detail the various demo content that is ready for you to start exploring with the new products.

First off, a few of the interesting items that might catch your attention outside of the various visual usability features are presented here.

What's new

• Support for Red Hat JBoss EAP 6.4.
• Realtime Execution Server
• a standalone, out-of-the-box component that can be used to instantiate and execute rules via interfaces available for REST, JMS or a Java client side application. Created as a web deployable WAR file, this engine can be deployed on any supported web container.
• Extending Business Central
• Business Central can now be configured to add new screens, menus, editors, splash screens and perspectives by the Administrator. These elements can extend the functionality of Business Central.
• limited support is also provided for branding of Business Central, including logos, colors and backgrounds.
• Task form improvements
• additional functionality such as the ability to embed your designed forms into external applications.
• Documents in processes
• create your own strategy to handle uploaded documents attached to a form.
• Business Resource Planner
• a lightweight planning engine, is included with this release and is fully supported.
• Social Aspects
• some social feeds for keeping up with user activities across the organization, watch as users build up history and activities in information streams.
• Certifications
• JDK: Oracle Java 8 and OpenJDK 8.
• Browsers: Firefox 31 and Internet Explorer 10.
• Servers: Oracle WebLogic 12c and Red Hat JBoss Fuse 6.1 (Engine only).
• Databases: Oracle 12c, PostgreSQL 9.2 Enterprise and DB2 10.5.
• Technical Preview (not yet fully supported)
• Guided Decision Trees Editor
• a new editor has been added to support modeling of simple decision trees.
• Asset Management
• a new feature that allows you to create repository structures, including branches, for maintenance, versioning and distribution of your projects Assets can be moved between different branches and repositories can be managed or unmanaged.

Outside of the new and shiny features that are available, we have some exiting content to let you explore the new products without having to build a project yourself.

Demo overview

JBoss BPM Baggage process

The following demo projects can all be found in JBoss Demo Central, but are listed here for you to explore directly.

Note that this new product release uses an installer that no longer includes JBoss EAP, so you will need the JBoss EAP 6.1 installer and the JBoss BRMS or JBoss BPM Suite installers.

• JBoss BPM Suite install demo
• an clean installation with some basic user configuration to get you started.
• JBoss BPM Travel Agency demo

  

  JBoss Travel Agency RestAPI example application.

• comprehensive travel industry demo with web services, rules, guided rules, fraud detection, compensation, tasks, example web application with RestAPI interaction and more...
• JBoss BPM Suite Baggage demo
• a travel industry example of using domain model, rules, guided rules, decision table and external spreadsheet to calculate lost baggage shipping fees.
• JBoss BPM Suite Mortgage demo



JBoss BPM Mortgage process designer

• the showcase financial example demo project with rules, guided rules, tasks, decision table, exception handling, web service integration and domain model.
• JBoss BPM Suite Rewards demo
• a human resource employee rewards process to showcase domain model, user tasks and a few more advanced BPM features which you can build from scratch in the online JBoss BPM Site workshop.
• JBoss BPM Suite Customer Evaluation demo
• a straight through process (STP) highlighting domain model and rules used to validate a customer for potential sales activities. 
• JBoss BPM Suite Generic Loan demo



JBoss BPM BAM reports

• a financial basic loan demo with rules, guided rules, tasks, model and a signal.
• JBoss BPM Site ECM demo
• a telco mobile service activation process with document management for user to sign a service agreement and upload the form.
• JBoss BRMS install demo
• an clean installation with some basic user configuration to get you started.
• JBoss BRMS Cool Store demo
• a retail based demo project showcasing rules, guided rules, domain model, decision table, events and a ruleflow which you can build from scratch in the online JBoss BRMS workshop.

Do note that the various demo projects have the option to build a containerized version with docker, these will be updated to the new products over the coming days.

Moving forward there will be more demo project updated and included that are currently in progress to showcase some of the new features listed above.

Japanese translation (日本語訳)

Red Hat Taste of Training - Managing Virtual Databases with JDV

There are often questions asked of me around JBoss Integration & BPM products when people run into me at conferences, events or online.

I have taken many of these questions home with me and they get answered in the form of an article around Tips&Tricks label or maybe a demo project gets created.

I am a teacher, I have a story to tell and you out there are a big part of the path this story takes.

Sometimes a student is just looking for a learning experience that mirrors the classroom, so with that in mind Red Hat has provided a series of free videos that give you a Taste of Training.

This just under 5 minute video will teach you how to manage virtual databases using the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) console, a part of Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization server.

It is based on the course JB450, Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization Development.

Enjoy and be sure to check out the other offerings brought to you by Red Hat Training.

JBoss BPM Suite Quick Guide: Automating Email User Task Notifications (part 2)

Previously we went through a project where there was a bit of trouble around the completion of user tasks in a timely manner.

We showed you how to setup automated task reassignment for any task that was claimed from the group and then not completed in a timely manner.

We had the task reassigned back into the group for others to work on.

Little did we know this would not be enough to make this process project run smoothly for our users, so read on in this first part one of two articles that will lead you through setting up email notifications for your processes.

The problem

After putting this into production we noticed that it was not enough to just assume that users from a group would claim and complete tasks in a timely manner.

The issue that arose was that these users had no idea when a task was waiting for them as there were no alerts.

Figure 1: task properties to add notification.

We need to setup an email alert to be sent to the group and/or users when a new user task is added to the group and sits unattended for a specified period of time.

The configuration

Before we can actually use the JBoss BPM Suite process designer to setup our desired email notifications, we need to make sure our server is configured to process email notifications, knows our users and knows our groups.

Figure 2: notifications will open the editor.

See part one of this series for the details around configuration of a JBoss BPM Suite server for sending e-mail through the provided sub-system.

The notifications

We are now ready to a an email notification to our user task, the Approve Reward task in our example project.*

In the process designer select the user task, open the Properties panel on the right as shown in figure 1. Then open the Editor for Notifications found under the Extra Properties section as shown in figure 2.

Figure 3: body message.

In the editor we can add a new notification and fill in the fields with the following data:

• Type: not-started
• Expires at: 2m
• From: Administrator
• To Users: erics
• To Groups: manager
• Reply to: (leave empty)
• Subject: Task needs attention
• Body: (enter body of message, for example see figure 3)

The results should have your editor looking something like figure 4, after which we can save and commit our adjustments to the process.

Figure 4: notification for task completed.

If you configured the project yourself as shown in part 1 of this series, or if you are using the provided workshop demo project*, then you can now build and deploy to test the e-mail notifications in your process.

Within the default JBoss BPM Suite notification configuration, we have chosen to use the default mail setup. This is a setup that expects a local SMTP server (mail server) to listen for messages on port 25.

Figure 5: capturing e-mail notifications.

The easiest way to test this without setting up your own mail sever, is to make use of the provided fakeSMTP server as found in the support directory from our example project.*

You can run this as admin user and start the server to catch JBoss BPM Suite server e-mail notifications when you run your process and let the Approve Reward task sit in the group unclaimed for longer than 2 minutes:

$ sudo java -jar support/fakeSMTP.jar

When e-mail notifications are sent you should see them appear in the fakeSMTP applications window as shown in figure 5.

This concludes the series on automating e-mail user task notifications, where we configured the server and then showed you how to setup a user task to generate e-mail notifications.

(Back to part 1)

[*In this article we will use the HR Employee Rewards demo project as a baseline, which you can also build from scratch by following the JBoss BPM Suite online workshop. If you obtain this project, follow the install instructions you will find a completed solution of what is described here.]