What's uEngine

One of the biggest promises of Business Process Management was that the business people can model and execute their business processes without involvement from IT folks. This promise was kept in a simple workflow sceanarios by utilizing limited number of 'built-in' activity types of BPMS packages but once you face little more complex business process sceanarios providing transactional integration with existing software and complex interactions with human beings, this limited expression power make it hard to drag and drop process modeling, and finally it brings a huge help from software vendors or system integrators and write a lot of code that is making processes utterly inflexible downstream. That means, concurrent BPMS is extremely lack in something like 'Technical Abstraction' and 'Expression Extensibility'.

There was several attempts to bridge the gap beween IT professionals and business analysts. Among those attemps, the UML and domain-specific component frameworks separates the 'modeling space' and 'source code space' and seperates the domain-knowledge as components from the technical things as the hotspots of the framework respectively.

If there is a domain-specific component framework architecture for BPMS and the technical activities can be wrapped as components, that would be pluggable into the framework, then once programmer writes the activity component, the business analysts can just use them by configuring in GUI tools (process modeller) without any knowledge on techinical things since a kind of 'translation job between IT and business language' has been done by the programmer. That's what uEngine does. uEngine is a component framework and a GUI-based component assembling tool targeted to BPM domain. The uEngine component framework separates activity type component interfaces and the business process execution engine like the J2EE separates the business logic components from the complex transactional web application engine. And the uEngine's process designer (process modeling tool), that is acting like a component assembling tool like UML or MDA tools do, allows business analysts can drag, drop and configure the activity type components (The one thing different between uEngine and UML or MDA tools is uEngine process designer generates the process definition language not the java or .NET source codes for process execution). This approach promotes the 'Continuos Improvement' not only in business processes but also in the BPM SW architecture level.

In conclusion, uEngine added 'Technical Abstraction' and 'Expression Extensiblity' to existing BPMS architecture by referencing the object-oriented application development methodology.

Another Reasons for uEngine

1. Embedded: By its Component Framework based Architecture, uEngine is easy to port, configure, and tailor into your enviroment or your own product.
2. Powerful: By sufficient pratical adoption, uEngine covers most process patterns from Page-flow, Decision (Rule) flow, Workflow, EAI flow, to B2Bi flow.
3. Fully-loaded: By incorporating best open source products like Liferay Portal, Mondrian OLAP Server, Apache Axis Web Services Container, uEngine provides most things commercial products do.
4. Open source: You're free to use, sell, embbed uEngine.

uEngine is a Component Framework

uEngine has been built on top of a component framework that separates logic and technique so that developers can easily add new functions without consideration of the side effect of core of the engine. Especially, uEngine's component-based development approach by refined in the workflow-based development provides a provated system analysis and development methodology. That is, this approach guides developers to produce more reusable components in the process-oriented business applications. The kinds of uEngine component interfaces are listed below:

1. Custom Activity Type Interface: uEngine allows custom activity development by providing an Activity Type Component Interface like EJB Containers do for Business Logics (EJBs). uEngine activity component model follows the Javabeans' setter/getter programming convention to allow a systemic design time support by reflection. Namely, uEngine Process Designer works like a Bean-box for the activity types and generates input forms and related GUIs for editing the activity type by getting activity types' object model on the fly. This allows developers to easily add new activity types without worrying about GUI implementation like AWT or Swing. And uEngine serializes the activity definition by XStream, which is an open-source Java-XML mapping toolkit. It is a simple but generic solution to persist activity definitions (Process definition) without redesign (rewrite XML builder codes) of Process Definition Model. [Samples : 1, 2, 3]

2. Organizational Reference Strategy Component: Most BPM products have their own organization model. So when you incorporate BPM products into your environment, you should write some batch program which work for a synchronization job. In the other hand, uEngine provides an strategy interface so that you can write strategy components to point at your own organization model. It prevents you from duplicated management of organization data as well as dependancy of a proprietary complex organization model of other vendor's product.[Samples : 1, 2]

3. Activity Listener/Filter: During a business process performs, a number of activities would begin and complete. Sometimes you require to hook those engine's system events. uEngine provides 'ActivityFilter' interface to be called back with those events. It allows you to powerful extensions like dropping audit trail data, alerting workitem notification, or storing work list information into external databases.[Samples : 1, 2]

4. Persistence Logic: uEngine need to stores the state of business processes' state, variables, role bindings in its run-time. To let them persist, 'ProcessInstance' component will be used. By default, uEngine stores the data into relational database by the class 'EJBProcessInstance', which is a subclass of 'ProcessInstance'.[Samples : 1, 2]

5. Worklist Queuing Service: When a task is routed to an user, there should be a way to notify him and stores the list of tasks. UEngine invokes the methods of 'Worklist' interface when a task is registered, finished or cancelled. By default, uEngine uses the sub-class 'JDBCWorklist', which stores task information into database table.[Samples : 1, 2]

Related Materials
Activity Type Registry XML
uEngine Component Configuration Property
uEngine Standalone Customization Guide