Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4. Understanding the KIE
Workbench
By now, you hopefully have a clear understanding of the BPM system structure, the lan-
guage that we will use to define our business processes, and we already had a sneak pre-
view of the jBPM6 project APIs and how BPMN 2.0 is used to describe processes.
Now, it is time to take a look at the tooling provided by the jBPM6 project. The jBPM6
tooling projects contain both a platform to integrate multiple forms of knowledge (informa-
tion), as well as functionality to extend and run said commands. This knowledge can be in
the form of processes, rules, decision tables, and so on. Because of that, it has been encap-
sulated under the concept of Knowledge Is Everything ( KIE ) and exposed in a
workbench-like web interface called the KIE Workbench .
A workbench , in this context, means a piece of software that allows both file management
and application functionalities. In this sense, the KIE Workbench provides knowledge asset
file management (to design processes, data models, and other knowledge components) and
process and rule runtimes. It also allows us to configure external communications (a topic
we will cover in detail in Chapter 10 , Integrating KIE Workbench with External Systems ).
In this chapter, we will study the tools provided by this workbench and their relationship
with jBPM6.
This chapter starts by describing the tools provided by the workbench and describes how to
implement your own domain-specific tooling from scratch, keeping in mind the important
concepts to have on a full workbench. After we understand the tooling components, we will
discuss how to extend the already provided workbench to add our own extra components.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
• How to set up the environment to start working with jBPM6
• The workbench description and how to start working with processes in it
• The workbench internal architecture
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