It's neat to see users push the envelope of our software. Flux evaluators often test performance and scalability of Flux to determine if it will satisfy their needs. We've watched the needs of users evolve and have changed the functionality of Flux to meet their needs.

Flux BPM was introduced in Flux 6.5 to allow people to play a part in business processes that are managed via Flux. This feature met the needs of many users and still does today. We see a lot of potential with this functionality and have made plans to help it grow and be more useful to our customers.

We field a lot of new feature and improvement requests for Flux BPM and cannot possibly allocate resources to implement all of the wonderful requests we get. So, we have decided to rewrite Flux BPM in a more usable way. The new Flux BPM will not be integrated into Flux itself, but rather will be supplied as an example that can be customized to meet your needs.

I've been working on this new BPM example (I'm calling it Flux4People) off and on the past week or so. I've taken this opportunity to illustrate how to write a Flux-based application. This example will act as a blueprint to illustrate to new Flux developers how to integrate Flux into their application. Maven, Hibernate, JPA, JAAS, and JSP are some of the major technologies I'm using. I originally implemented the services as JAX-RS RESTful web services using Jersey (https://jersey.dev.java.net/) but then migrated to a simple JSP solution for performance and simplicity.

The Flux4People example will illustrate how to embed the Web-based Workflow Designer, integrate with Flux security, and how to implement custom triggers. I'm putting the final touches on the implementation before handing the Flux4People example over to the graphics team to beautify. Keep an eye on my blog to be notified when the example is ready.

How will the Flux4People example work? It's quite simple actually and works much like Flux BPM. Basically, I've implemented a custom Flux trigger that adds a task to the database. I've also implemented services to list tasks by owner and to work tasks. These services can be invoked by the web application to display a task dashboard to the user and allow the user to work through tasks.

I'll be posting the full example in the next week or so. Let me know if you have any questions or comments in the meantime!