difference between spring webflow and jBPM

[chav]

What are the differences between Spring Web Flow and JBoss jBPM?

[Keith Donald]

Spring Web Flow is focused on being the best solution for the management and orchestration of a page flow within a web application. It's ideal for controlled navigations that span a series of steps involving the user...

I've personally never used jBPM, but know it's a much more general purpose workflow engine (support for routing work to queues to be processed asynchronously, etc.)

I see a jPBM or a OSWorkflow addressing business logic concerns in the middle tier. Spring Web Flow is much more focused and addresses the problem of navigation in the web-tier...

I imagine the two could be used in conjunction.

Keith

[klr8]

The add a bit to Keith explanation:

OSWorkflow and jBPM aspire to be full featured, general purpose workflow engines. They support all workflow concepts, like forks and joins. SWF on the other hand is not a general purpose workflow engine. It is limited to pageflow, which is a particular, simplefied form of workflow. The fact that SWF is not general purpose allows it to be easier to use and much more focused. It tries to do one thing right (pageflow), and not handle all other possible requirements.

Erwin

[johninfosys]

If we know spring web flow,we could easily handle any BPM as most of things are same apart from BPD.
=>flow&subflow---complxrule&simple rule
=>input mappings, etc .

[totempole]

I tend to use them at different scales. Spring web flow is more fine-grained, short lasting, non-persistent, web-centric. jBPM is for long lasting, coarse grained work flows. For example, an online shopping website can map an entire order history to a jBPM process, while placing one order is just one activity in the process. On the other hand, placing an order can be implemented as multiple web flows (login, shopping cart, place order) in SWF.