Recently my colleague Daniel pointed me to JBoss Openshift, an initiative from JBoss to jump on the cloud train, nobody can avoid these days. But actually there is something really cool in it: You can create and run a JBoss AS 7 in the cloud easily, having either H2 or even MySQL available as a database. After playing around with it took me a Saturday to write a plug-in for the cycle component of camunda fox. This allows us to create and run a process application containing a BPMN 2.0 process at a worldwide reachable URL in a minute Interested? Watch this short screen-cast…

The demo application I deploy there is the one I wrote for the last WJAX, see my blog post with a screencast including the whole presentation. If you are quick I have not yet deleted the cloud instance, so check it our yourself: http://orderdemocloud-camunda8.rhcloud.com/order-confirmation-rules/.

Currently Daniel and me are writing an article for the German magazine “Java Spektrum“. There we explain a bit more the idea of process applications using Activiti as a BPMN 2.0 process engine and JBoss 7 as Java EE 6 compliant server, this will be published early 2012, don’t miss it. A good question is about the use case for this scenario. I currently see two very interesting ones:

• Private Clouds: Think of the same mechanism inside your company. No longer long processes required to get a test or integration system up and running (how long does this take at your company in average? I saw even months at some customers, including hardware procurement).
• Quick-Start: For some companies the data security aspect of having the application running in the cloud might not be a major drawback, especially compared to the advantage of being fast and easy. Not to mention, that the starter edition of JBoss OpenShift is for free, at least at the moment.

In order to get started:

• Create a SSHkey pair (yeah, this is unfortunately needed to get it all running), I used PuttyGen (remember you have to export a RSA key and this must be copied to ~/.ssh/id_rsa).
• Register for JBoss OpenShift
• Get a GIT environment up and running on your local machine (e.g. Putty & TortoiseGit on Windows)
• Download the cycle preview
• Checkout and build the Openshift-Plug-In for cycle by yourself and add it (and all necessary third party libraries as e.g. JGit) to the classpath of cycle (basically the WEB-INF/lib folder)

Please remember: This is a proof of concept, the plug-in was hacked on one Saturday and is not production ready! We just wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to write plug-ins and how cool use cases you can implement I have some things in it only working under windows which would need to be fixed (e.g. calling “mvn.bat”). So watch out for the the TODO’s in the code if you want to play with it or maybe even use it in real projects…