The jBPM team is proud to announce the release of jBPM 5.1.0.

jBPM is a flexible open-source Business Process Management (BPM) Suite. The core of jBPM is a light-weight, extensible workflow engine written in pure Java that allows you to execute business processes using the latest BPMN 2.0 specification. It can run in any Java environment, embedded in your application or as a service. On top of that, it supports a lot of tooling to support the business process through its entire life cycle, both for developers and business users. This includes an Eclipse plugin, web-based Designer, repository, management console, etc.

For more information, check out the release announcement.  You can download everything here.  The documentation has been improved significantly, and a large number of examples now show different types of business processes in action.

So update your processes now and start taking advantage of the new features!

The JBPM integration with Drools is a powerful construct. Although any idea when the developer guide for jbpm 5.1 seems to be coming out ? 

Yeah, it seems after Tom left for Activiti, JBPM teams started to drift a bit. One of the symptoms is somewhat uncoordinated development direction. Add that painful lack of useful documentation and you start to catch the gravitational field of the alternatives. We shifted to other open source BPM engine in our projects, far better documented and easier to use. I think it's time for them to regroup.

The jBPM documentation used to be split into a user guide and a developer guide, where the user guide focused more on higher-level overview and the developer guided added more implementation details.  However, since the amount of documentation kept on growing, we decided that it would be better to have one guide, where initial chapters focus on the overview and additional chapter go a lot deeper in specific concepts like human task management, the web-based management console, etc.

The latest documentation has been improved significantly recently and can be found here: http://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/v5.1/userguide/

Note that the current jBPM user guide is about 50% larger than the user + development guide in previous releases.  But we always welcome any feedback (http://www.jboss.org/jbpm/community) you might have for things you believe are still missing !

Kris Verlaenen, jBPM project lead

Thanks for the update .