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01/04/09 :: [BPM] Grosse Fatigue (DEAD Tired) [permalink]

I really don't know why I spend any part of my Sunday looking at jBPM, maybe I am always hoping that one day one of the BPM thought leader of our industry will come up with something of value that can really bear the name "BPM". It's true that I had given up on jBPM a few years ago and I wanted to see if it was still fair to ignore it.

I browsed through the documentation.

As you can imagine I was intrigued by the "state" activity. Unfortunately Tom needs to take some linguistic classes. Here is how he defines a state (he defines all states that way):

<state name="Verify supplier">
    <flow name="Supplier ok" to="Check supplier data" />
    <flow name="Supplier not ok" to="Error" />
</state>

There are two kinds of verbs: action verbs and state verbs. Action verbs are used to show when somebody does something. State verbs are verbs that state that something IS. I assume in his mind "Verify" is a state verb. This is elementary school grammar. I don't know Dutch, but I assume they have the same distinction.

The section on "variables" is marked "TO DO" so I don't have any hope to see any resource lifecycle. Ever since I came across Tom's work, he's had a UML activity-ish approach to BPM and adding a "BPMNish" look and feel is not going to change anything.

Subbu forwarded me this quote from Ted Neward:

XML Services: Roy Fielding will officially disown most of the "REST"ful authors and software packages available. Nobody will care--or worse, somebody looking to make a name for themselves will proclaim that Roy "doesn't really understand REST". And they'll be right--Roy doesn't understand what they consider to be REST, and the fact that he created the term will be of no importance anymore. Being "REST"ful will equate to "I did it myself!", complete with expectations of a gold star and a lollipop.

It looks to me that our industry has entered "the bigger fool" phase . Everything is up for grab and anyone can pretend that his/her product/project does "foo" if "foo" is what makes their product/project sells.