What is the easiest way to add BPM to a J2EE application? [closed]

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I am a .NET programmer who is tasked with adding a web based BPM designer interface, to an existing J2EE application in Tomcat 6 running jBPM 3.2, in Windows XP. As you know jBPM 3.2 does not have a web based designer interface. How would i upgrade or replace jBPM 3.2 with a more end-user friendly BPM, in a proven, stable,cost effective way ? I am asking this question since i struggled with (jBPM 5.x+Tomcat 6), (jBPM 5.x+Jboss1.12), (Eval version of BRMS + EAP 6) and never got even a sample working,leave alone implement in the real application. If one piece works, the other does not. I hope this is not dismissed as being unfit for this forum.

Thanks.

Answer 1

First of all I wish you good luck and not too much overtime. Adding a BPM engine later to an existing project is at least ...interesting.

Nevertheless I used Activiti with JEE (Glassfish 3.x) in some projects (http://www.activiti.org/) with good results. Activiti provides a runtime which can be integrated in your JEE application. It provides a (more high-level) web based Activiti Modeler where business people provide the process. This needs to be technicaly enriched with the Activiti Designer (Eclipse Plugin). You will then deploy the process to the engine.

Initial setup: a few hours. Fully working production environment with real processes: if you do it the first time ~a few month

There is also a quite good hands-on book available from Manning Publications: Activiti in Action

Answer 2

As you, I came from the .NET world and I tried to find a suitable BPM engine that can integrate to J2EE environments in a civil court management project (integrating a .NET app with an EMC Documentum Java app +with workflow mechanisms).

We tried many, but we eventually ended up using the PNM BPM software suite and we're very happy with it. (http://www.pnmsoft.com). It was very easy to set up and connects to Java environments easily. It has all the designers and fancy stuff, etc. We tried other alternatives like jPBM and others but they were not intuitive enough and required high levels of Unix-system knowledge.