Seam and JBPM

Practical JBoss Seam Projects
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1) jBPM Supporting tasks implemented in variety of ways (web pages, business components, business rules, etc.), connected together with a structured workflow that can span multiple users across potentially long periods of time.

2) And in the case of Seam, a jbpm pageflow is actually part of a single Seam conversation within a single session.

3) A business process consists of a set of nodes or states, linked by various possible transitions.

4) Events in the business process cause various actions to be executed.

5) There are eight nodes in this workflow. Six of them are named states in the process:

the starting state ("start-state'),
a "write article" task,
a "tech edit" task,
a "copy edit" task,
a "revise article" task,
the end state ("end')

The other two, unnamed nodes are a fork, between the article submission and the two parallel editing tasks, and a join, where the two parallel editing tasks transition to the article revision task.

Various transitions exist between these nodes. Some of these are named, indicating specific actions that have to take place in order for the transition to take place. Others are not named, either because there is only one transition out of a given node, or the nature of the transition is obvious from the start and end nodes.

jBPM maintains the process model in terms of the allowed states, the various transitions between states, and actions and events that can trigger these transitions.

BPM also includes the concept of actors, allowing you to specify what type of user can and should perform specific tasks in the process.