EmForge Workflow Development

One of the major feature of EmForge, comparing to other competitors - is Workflow Engine, build into the EmForge.

By default, some default workflows are included into EmForge distribution, but, if you need to specify own workflow, for example for Bug-Fixing, or for Feature Development, or create any new workflow to automate some other process - you will need to develop your own workflow.

Why jBPM

jBoss jBPM Framework is used for workflow implementation in EmForge. We choose this framework by different reasons:

1. It is very flexible;
2. It is very easy to integrate into J2EE project;
3. It is very easy to use by developer (it is important for us - since EmForge is designed first of all for managing software development projects). Same Eclipse is used for develop workflows, you can use unit-tests for their testing and so on and so on.

We are using to develop verb specially (instead of 'to design' for example) - since working with Workflows in jBPM is very close to software development.

Graphical Process Designer

jBoss GPD is used for developing new workflows for EmForge.

For, first of all you will need to download and install GPD (it is Eclipse plugin, so, we hope for many Eclipse users it will not produce any problems).

Unfortunately, we do not found any detailed tutorial about jBPM usage, so, here we will try to describe some basic things, you can do with GPD for designing jBPM processes in general and some special features, you can use to execute this workflows in EmForge.

In any case we highly recommend to read jBPM Tutorial - there you can read about many and many jBPM features, not covered by these tutorials.

Simplest workflow development

Simplest Workflow Development article describes how to start first jBPM project, create simplest workflow and deploy it into EmForge.

Deploy Workflow Into EmForge

Deploy Workflow Into EmForge article describes how to deployed developed workflow into EmForge.

Execute Workflow in EmForge

Execute Workflow In EmForge describes how to execute deployed workflow in EmForge.

Workflow with Task Assignment

Workflow With Task Assignment describes how to assign some to another users

Workflow and EmForge Roles

Workflow And EmForge Roles describes about linking swimlanes in jBPM workflow and roles in EmForge

Next Steps

These simplest examples demonstrate some basic workflow features, like step assignments and integration of jBPM workflows into EmForge. But there are much more features available in jBPM and EmForge like:

• Sub-Process creation
• Splitting and Joining workflows
• Programatic Actions

and many jBPM functions are still not used (or not tested) under EmForge.

We hope this examples are demonstrated that developing jBPM workflows with JBoss GPD and their execution in EmForge is easy from one side - but very flexible from another.

You can use workflows, available in EmForge itself as start-point for your workflow development.