Patterns-based evaluation of open source BPM systems : the cases of jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark

The abundance of approaches towards business process specification and enactment is well-known and is an ongoing source of confusion. One of the objectives of the Workflow Patterns Initiative is to provide insights into comparative strengths and weaknesses of the state-of-the-art in Process Aware Information Systems (PAISs).Over the past years many approaches to business process specification including commercial offerings, modelling languages, and academic prototypes have been evaluated in terms of the patterns in order to assess their capabilities in terms of expressing control-flow dependencies, data manipulation and resource allocation directives. With the increasing maturity and popularity of open source software it seems opportune to take a closer look at such offerings in the Business Process Management (BPM) area. This report provides a patterns-based evaluation of three well-known open source workflow management systems: jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark.