Objects and web-services in jBPM

Question

Is it possible to consume web-services and/or use own libraries (and thus custom objects) into a jBPM workflow? Eventually, could I expose this process as (another) web-service?

Answer 1

You can use web services in jBPM, at least in version 5 and 6. I believe the tooling support in eclipse is minimal or non-existent however. Don't know about the support in web console. See Maciej's blog for details on that.

It is possible to use custom objects and own libraries in jBPM. You just have to make the libraries available to the jBPM runtime. If you're using your own application where you run jBPM, just include the libraries in the CLASSPATH. For the jBPM console, you will have to include the libraries in the lib/ directory of the war, or inside WEB-INF/classes if you have .class files.

Not sure if there is out of the box support for exposing jBPM services over web service. If all you want to do is orchestrate other web services and expose yourself as a web service, you could consider using a BPEL engine rather, like Apache ODE

Answer 2

jBPM can call web services and contain custom libraries. A jBPM project is a Maven project, so you can add dependencies to your POM to include custom libraries. You can call web services or execute any custom Java code you want by creating a "Domain-specific process." There is an example in the documentation about how to do that: http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v6.0.1/userguide/jBPMDomainSpecificProcesses.html

Also, if you deploy your projects into the jBPM web console, they can be started and controlled by a REST API. So yes, they are exposed as a REST web service. See this page in the documentation about the REST API: http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v6.0.1/userguide/jBPMRemoteAPI.html

For example, the following REST call can initiate a process (taken from the link above):

[POST] /runtime/{deploymentId}/process/{processDefId}/start