jbpm questions before project start

Question

I need to evaluate the jbpm workflow engine at this time, after read the documentation I got following questions, if someone can point me any hints will be greatly appreciated(sample code for these questions is preferable)!

1. I know jbpm can generate the UI for task with the help of eclipse plugin, is it easy to modify the generated UI ?

2. Is it possible for jbpm to show the state of current process include current state, and history states.

3. Where can I see the jbpm database schema and specification for the schema ?

4. Can I deploy the jbpm engine to weblogic later ? If we use weblogic, is it better to integrate jbpm with seam framework or spring framework ?

5. Is it possible to terminate the process at the middle of process ?

6. Can jbpm support generate report for all the processes ?
   Thanks in advance !

Answer 1

All my answers are mostly jBPM 3 specific, as I have no knowledge on jBPM 4. jBPM 3 is also the version that is supported with Seam.

1. What do you mean by UI task? If you mean the jbpm eclipse plugin that comes with JBoss Tools, to help you design your processes, then yes. This is quite easy to do.

2. jbpm can show current tasks belonging to Actor x, all processes for actors etc. For history, it doesn't support it directly. You will have to create your own queries if you want to get hold of some information/processes that are ended. This is however possible to do in jbpm 4

3. If you look at hibernate-cfg.xml, there whould be information on the jbpm database schema. If you want to see the the hbm.xml schema files you have to download the jbpm-jpdl.jar file, unzip it and look at it there.

4. I don't know anything about weblogic. But you can change any supported webservers without any problems later. We use JBPM with Seam and it works well. However if you want to use a later version of jBPM (4), then you should not use Seam, as it is not supported directly with the Seam api.

5. Yes. You can either do this programatically, or using transition to end.

6. You have to specify what you mean by report.