JWT moved to Eclipse SOA

The Eclipse SOA top-level project has a new member: the Java Workflow Tooling (JWT) project finished the Move Review successfully. JWT aims to build design time, development time and runtime workflow tools and to foster an ecosystem of interoperable Business Process Management (BPM) platforms.
Therefore, it supports the enrichment of business process models (e.g. initially modeled in BPMN) with runtime data or services, allows the user to generate code (e.g. in XPDL or to BPEL) and provides an extensible mechanism to customize the models via aspects.

Thereby, JWT has already been part of Eclipse Galileo. With this move, the project has once more proven to be mature. JWT will graduate from incubation probably together with or shortly after the Helios release in June 2010.

Congratulations to the team and the new project leads of JWT!

Together with the move review, I took a step back and will only be a committer of the JWT project anymore, but no longer project co-lead. Reason for this is that I finished my Ph.D. successfully and work as a technical consultant now (my employer is Senacor Technologies) which leaves me with less time for JWT. In my opinion being a project lead requires a lot more time than only one hour every two weeks or so. As Chris Saad already supported me in the last few years, it was only natural that he stepped forward to fill this place.

I would like to say thanks for your support, Chris, as well as to my project co-lead colleague and friend, Marc Dutoo (OpenWide SA). We had been a great team and complemented each other perfectly. Now as a committer, I hope to find more time to code again while being less focused on the roadmap, release train, etc. as I know that those will be in good hands at Chris and Marc.

One of the good things of my new job is my current location: I'm working at a project for the Deutsche Post at the moment and am therefore only meters away from Sopera who are deeply involved in the Eclipse SOA project. I already met some of the guys during lunch and hope that we can use the close distance to bring the Eclipse SOA projects closer together, too.

To learn more about JWT and the whole SOA top-level project, come to EclipseCon and follow the talk about Eclipse SOA TLP: Lock, Stock and Barrel. If you have questions about JWT, feel free to ask the two project co-leads who will both be available at the talk.

Two talks at EclipseCon 2010 related to JWT

Only recently the program for EclipseCon 2010 has been announced and the program committee did a fairly good job in my opinion: they found a good mixture of different topics that the audience will be interested in.

There will be at least two talks that are related to the Technology project "Java Workflow Tooling" (JWT). Our project community submitted some more which were unfortunately rejected. Those had JWT in their focus, so the audience won't be able to hear a detailed talk about JWT this year. Maybe we will have more luck next year.

The first one will give a short overview about JWT as part of the talk Eclipse SOA TLP: Lock, Stock and Barrel where the upcoming top-level project Eclipse SOA will be described and all the sub-projects that will be part of it.

The second one is about how a metamodel evolution can be done and whether this might be painfull or painless for the modeler. This one is presented by my colleague Chris Saad from the University of Augsburg and Etienne Juliot from Obeo SA: Painless (?) Metamodel Evolution.

I didn't submit an abstract this year as from February on I won't work for the University of Augsburg anymore and I am not sure whether my future employer would pay me the trip.