decoupling jbpm and alfresco

[forumwebuser]

Hello,

Im new to alfresco, but as far as I understand, alfresco and all its components are deployed in a single web application. Because I need to use a workflow system, and because alfresco already uses and deploys Jbpm, I was wondering if I couldnt use this workflow to create my enterprise worflows. But following this path, it would seems more correct to take off the jbpm deployment from the alfresco web application and deploy it as a single independent application in a specific jvm and then connect alfresco to it and any other application. Is this possible? Does it makes any sense for all of you?

thank you

[invictus9]

The jBPM engine inside Alfresco is gifted with knowledge of the resources in the Alfresco environment. These include the document resources, people resources (IDs and groups), and other work flows. Among other things, this allows a fairly simple interface from the Javascript steps you can embed in the work flow steps to access and modify the Alfresco repository.

You could certainly arrange that other systems could use the Alfresco jBPM, presuming that you had shared credentials, via web scripts or web services. Those other systems could have bi-directional connections to allow for status displays, notifications and remote triggering.

You would still have to have jBPM inside of Alfresco because Alfresco depends on it for many actions, such as repeating events, like nightly purging. It might be possible to write a set of shims to hand off any more complex actions to another jBPM server. The jBPM server would then have to have a set of adapters available to access document properties, etc.