Galileo Freshman Project #4: Java Workflow Tooling (JWT)

Java Workflow Tooling (JWT),  is next up in my series on projects new to the Galileo release train.  Marc Dutoo is the project co-leader.

What does your project do?

Java Workflow Tooling brings open business process design and development to the Eclipse platform. Business Process Management (BPM) is at the crossroads of business, middleware and integration, so it really shouldn’t lock up the options of its actors. That’s why JWT-modeled processes can look the way the analyst wants, hold any implementation information the developer adds in, and be deployed to the runtime platform of choice.

This is possible thanks to a flexible framework allowing extensible views, model and transformations, that communities and vendors can build on. JWT comes with several built-in extensions like UML Activity Diagram or Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) views, BPMN interoperability, code generation (e.g. XPDL, or WSBPEL-code in the AgilPro integration, but also HTML documentation). There are actually already a few solutions that integrate JWT, such as the SOA-focused Scarbo of the OW2 consortium, or AgilPro in SourceForge.

Who are your typical users?

Business process analysts and developers in need of a truly open workflow platform, but also vendors and academics interested by the extensibility of its framework. And anyone who already has a task-oriented, workflow-like engine but is missing an editor, and is willing to write an export transformation in order to get one.

Why did you join the Galileo release train? After completing your first release train, what do you think now?

Being in the Galileo release train demostrates that JWT is a mature project that can be used and build on. It was not easy to fulfill all requirements for Galileo, but the attention it brings to JWT alone is worth it ! On the other side we believe that JWT provides features that are a valuable addition to Galileo. And looking back, getting into the release train was a unique opportunity to improve the general quality of the project and enhance its reactivity and agility, one step closer to graduation.

What future enhancements are you planning for your project?

In the next release we plan to improve runtime tooling, including process simulation within Eclipse, deployment, monitoring as well as support for JBoss jBPM, but also switch to a more powerful views mechanism supporting different layouts.

From http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com