I’m also referenced by name in the book, a nice pitch for me! I’ve ordered the book and I’ll publish a review later, but from what I’ve seen it looks very promising.

It’s written by Gary Mak of the best-selling Spring Recipes and Josh Long, an expert Spring user and developer.

• Key concepts of Business Process Management to understand how the community leads and implements open source software
• Gain deep understanding of JPDL, the preferred process language, to know how your processes must be defined and implemented
• Convert your projects into fully featured applications with advanced jBPM features such as the persistence service and human task mechanism
• Understand the framework’s behavior in different environments
• Create and configure Human Task activities to model situations where human beings interact with the process
• Understand how the framework handles information that flows through your business process
• Configure the persistence service to reduce risk and perform successful implementations with jBPM
• Improve your process definitions using nodes
• Configure the Eclipse IDE to start modeling your processes

Keep an eye on this blog to read the review.

Regards,
Andries

The book is intended as an good introduction into the BPM world, primarily for Business Analysts. For developers it promises a useful introduction to the key concepts with directions for implementing BPM the right way.

Things I didn’t like:

Let’s start with the easy part, trashing parts of the book. My first thought I had when I received the book, is that it’s rather small. With only a good 200 pages, stuffed with screenshots and code examples, the book is practically read in a day. And that is with every exercise made. Of course, you could also argue this is positive, but this brings me to my second issue: the book is not thoroughly enough for developers. I like to code and I need coding guidelines to do that. This book does not provide that.

Things I liked:

It’s a good thing that there are a lot more things I liked about the book. Firstly, the book actually delivers what it says: providing a good introduction into the jBPM world. Instead of being a reference book, it’s a hands-on book for Business Analysts. It’s short, to the point and very easy to read cover to cover.

The code examples just work! This seems normal, but it ain’t. I’ve read my share of books where the examples always needed a little magic to work. There is one catch: the examples work for jBPM Designer 3.2 (suite). They do not work with 3.2.2. I don’t know why or how, but the 3.2.2 version actually has LESS features then the older version. Took me a while to find it. (Actually, this is a negative…).

There is always a trade-off: provide a decent small examples, or deliver a large complete example. This book chose the latter, which would be way to large if they didn’t provide the example in real code, for each chapter. So you can start the next chapter with only the code you would have written in the previous one. Very well done! Makes it all the more fun to actually follow the examples throughout the book.

It handles stuff that’s pure BPM, and not only jBPM. It talks about kick-off meetings, project sponsors and SME‘s. This helps deliver a good broad image of BPM.

Conclusion

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about jBPM. It’s actually a fantastic book, if you know what it will deliver. Hands one experience from a business analysts view, nothing more, nothing less! For a developer like myself, it doesn’t provide the answers to actually create a full-wedged application with it, but it’ll help paving the way.

Andries