Happy New Year

...from the AI rBPM team. Our sabbatical proposal is to build a RoR BPM plugin that we can leverage for future process-intensive rails projects. Additionally the BPM will form the cornerstone of a larger service oriented framework for use alongside rails. While a few tools like this already exist, we believe competition and new ideas are good, and that the existing tools lack...to put it nicely...a certain rockstar quality.

Development will consist of two parts: a process designer (Dave) and a process engine (Martin). Our challenge for this week is to finish the Process Description Language (PDL) specification so that we can start coding.

The proposal research gave us a clear theoretical and practical direction to take. We are using Petri Nets as our underlying process theory and jBPM as our practical model. Additionally, we have several high level requirements including: no logical operators or conditional statements, documentation quality diagrams for business analysis, PDL is able to describe P4 patterns.

P4 or The Process Four (http://www.workflowpatterns.com/) is the process equivalent of the Gang of Four in Object Oriented software (Design Patterns). The P4 describe a set of process patterns that encompass anything a mature BPM would encounter. Most existing languages (BPMN, BPEL) do not support all patterns. In the spirit of TDD we are using these patterns to evaluate our PDL and test its elasticity by implementing them and modifying where needed. Eventually these implementations will form the foundational unit tests for the BPM plugin.

Today:

* Finished initial working draft of the PDL specification.
* Begin testing of ROXML + Active Record model object marshaling/unmarshling within the Rails environment. We will have a functional prototype posted tomorrow (if ROXML actually works) for any who are interested.
http://roxml.rubyforge.org/