Introduction
Disclaimer
I am by no means a professional on the topics mentioned nor the technologies; rather, this documentation is a blog on my experience as an amateur and hopefully serves as a light in the dark for beginners or any curious developers looking to perform a little project with business automation.
What is jBPM?
jBPM is a business automation tool for automating business processes with ease and providing accessibility through REST APIs and comprehensive documentation for said APIs. Optionally, with jBPM as a foundation, we can also build our own powerful applications and tools to personalise our experience. One of these applications include qBPM.
What is qBPM?
qBPM is a demonstrative web application for showcasing how jBPM can be used to create powerful tools through smooth integrations with various open source technologies.
Purpose of this documentation
This documentation will be dedicated to walking you through how you can set up a jBPM server, customise it to fit your needs, utilise jBPM to create automated processes, and integrate them with qBPM, our own custom webapp for presenting these automated processes.
What will we be creating in this walkthrough?
We will be using jBPM to create a work-from-home request portal to automate the process of requesting to work from home. This will help ease the lives of our HR team as well as our employees.
Prerequisites
- Installation of jBPM Server Distribution
- Node.js LTS
- Postgres setup
- Only install the setup and do not open it yet unless you know what you’re doing as I will be guiding you through this due to important configurations you need to follow for qBPM to work.
- JDK 17
- Stable version of Apache Maven
- Apache Maven allows us to build our qBPM application by installing the neccessary dependencies.
- Visual Studio Code
I recommend that you watch a video or read an article on how to install each software listed above(aside from jBPM as it’s just a straightforward zip file) as they will guide you through the installation process step by step. As a beginner it can be confusing when you see all the cryptic installation configurations.
Note
Every process mentioned in this documentation is based on my experience with Windows 10, so do keep in mind that results may vary from operating system to operating system.