7.3. Business process management in Seam
A business process is a well-defined set of tasks that must be performed by users or software systems according to well-defined rules about
who
can perform a task, and
when
it should be performed. Seam's jBPM integration makes it easy to display lists of tasks to users and let them manage their tasks. Seam also lets the application store state associated with the business process in the BUSINESS_PROCESS
context, and have that state made persistent via jBPM variables.
A simple business process definition looks much the same as a page flow definition (
One Kind of Stuff
), except that instead of <page>
nodes, we have <task-node>
nodes. In a long-running business process, the wait states are where the system is waiting for some user to log in and perform a task.
It is perfectly possible that we might have both jPDL business process definitions and jPDL pageflow definitions in the same project. If so, the relationship between the two is that a single <task>
in a business process corresponds to a whole pageflow <pageflow-definition>