jBPM Business Applications Demo - Process terminal using Spring Shell

So far our jBPM Business Applications demos have involved some sort of web-based UI for interacting with our business processes. Sometimes a web-ui is not needed and working with processes via an interactive terminal is the best way to get this done.

In this demo we show how to use Spring Shell inside your jBPM Business Application created via start.jbpm.org. Here is a quick screenshot of the demo application:

Demo schreenshot

We start our demo app as usual using the already provided launch scripts but once it starts we do not launch our browser and go to localhost:8090 (default) to access it, but instead we are presented with a prompt and can start typing in our commands to interact with our business processes.

Spring Shell provides some very useful commands out of the box, such as "help", "clear", "exit", "history", and "stacktrace". Our demo app defined ontop of that our own custom commands to interact with our business processes. 

Commands that we define in our business app demo are:

• deploy <groupId> <artifactId> <version>
• processdefs
• processinstances
• startprocess <processDefId> <deploymentId>

Our deploy command allows us to deploy a kjar module which is available in our local maven repository. The demo app comes with one such module which you can use to deploy after the application has started with the command:

The processdefs command simply shows all currently available process definition (across all deployments):

The startprocess command allows you to start a business process. It takes in the process definition id and the deployment unit id (if deployment unit id is not specified, the default one is assumed). So for example to start our "firstTestProcess" business process we can do:

Lastly, the processinstances command shows all process instances that are available, for example:

Finally here is a youtube video where we run the demo and show off all the commands. The video also explains the code and how to create custom commands using Spring Boot and Spring Shell.

(This is the first time I tried creating a youtube video intro so please don't laugh ....too much :) )

Hope this demo helps you guys get some ideas on how to create cool jBPM business apps.