Embedded jBPM engine

[tomnordaljensen]

I'm aware that the jBPM process engine is embedded in Alfresco. How thight is it embedded into the Alresco core? Is it possible to install the jBPM engine on a separate free standing server. The reason I ask is that I'm working on a technical architecture blueprint, where a PBM engine is required for other areas than in an ECM context only. Alfresco is the solution building block for ECM in this arhitecture.

[cheffilet]

Well jBPM is just a library you can get from http://www.jbpm.org. What Alfresco has been done with this library is to delegate common workflow-operations to a particulary implementation of a workflow-engine like jBPM. This means, if you´re working with Workflows and Alfresco, you´re working with the WorkflowService. This service is responsible to delegate your request (like getActiveWorkflows) to a BPM-Implementation. In Alfresco, jBPM is embedded in Spring  with the jbpm-spring-module. Thus calls upon the library is being managed through jbpmTemplates that can be named as a Spring-Pattern. In a jbPmTemplate you gain access to the whole jbpmcontext.

I´ve implemented jBPM for Instance in another DMS, being called LogicalDOC as well. Furthermore gaining access to the full power of jBPM on using jbpmTemplate in Alfresco is possible as well.  So its no problem to use jbpm easily in other projects.

In jBPM4 you have a more sophisticated Spring-Integration, so its pretty easy to manage and configure your "jBPM-Server" like before.