7. Working with event-driven business processes

The adoption of event-driven architecture (EDA) increases as the ecosystem of technologies that support it matures. The EDA is not new to the tech community, actually, it started to be adopted by more conservative organizations back in 2020. It’s been almost a year now since the EDA crossed the chasm as you can see in this Architecture and Design Trend Report created by InfoQ: 

Event-driven architectures had proven to be mature and more widely adopted in 2020.
Source: Architecture and Design Trend Report, 2020, by InfoQ

With this background in mind, let’s now shift towards how we can use process automation applications in such architectures. To get started, we can list at least three ways to adjust our business application fit within EDA:

  1. We can build processes that can react to events that happen in the ecosystem;
  2. From within the process, we can emit events to notify the ecosystem about key activities in the business process and interact with external services via events;
  3. We can track every transaction committed either for business processes, cases (case management), or human tasks by publishing events for.
The alignment of tech evolution and business standards like BMPN

When providing an implementation for a specification, each provider has the opportunity to deliver the solution of choice. It is not different for the BPMN specification. It allows different implementations for its diagram elements, and this is how jBPM delivers the most recent tech concepts by still allowing business users to use the modeling notation they are used to.

In jBPM (a.k.a. RHPAM), it is possible to make use of message events (starting, intermediate or ending) to interact via events. In this case, the KIE Server Kafka extension makes sure the communication occurs effectively with the event streaming brokers.

This section focuses on practical guides on how to use processes within an event-driven architecture. We will learn how to model the processes and when and how to add configurations to the business project and KIE Server. This section brings step-by-step guides on how to:

This section is part of the jBPM Getting Started series