Building JBPM5 from source
There’s been a lot of questions on the jBPM forums on how to start using jbpm5. There are two options: download the binary and test the project or do it the hard (and fun) way of checking out the trunk from the repository and compile it yourself.
This alternative is great one you want to dig deeper into the project and understand what happens under the hood. This can be very useful also in debugging situation where a bug is particularly hard to find and you want to check what comes in and out of the engine.
Requirements
To download and compile the jBPM5 sources we need a few tools. These are commonplace and perhaps familiar to you :
Downloading the trunk from GIT
Once you have GIT installed we will invoke the following command to clone (this is a new term coined by GIT and you can think of it as a regular checkout on steroids 
) the latest source code from the project’s repository:
git clone https://github.com/krisv/jbpm.git jbpm5
If you want to check out a particular version, be sure to change the repository path to point to another version. Take a look at the github project’s page.
Compiling and installing using Maven
After GIT finishes to fetch the source code, we need Maven to compile the sources using the project’s POM. It’s really easy thanks to Maven’s powerful engine, just type the following command in the target folder:
mvn install
This will compile the sources, run the appropriate tests (if you want to skip them just add -DskipTests before the install goal) and install the binary jars into the Maven’s local repository.
Optional: Creating Eclipse project’s metadata
If you use Eclipse to develop your project you’ll find this useful to have the jBPM5 sources into the IDE’s workspace. To do this just type:
mvn eclipse:eclipse
And Maven will take care of adding the project’s metadata into the existing project folders so you can use the “Import existing project into the workspace” command to have the sources inside your workspace (be sure to have the M2_REPO variable defined and pointed to your local Maven repository). For importing the source into other IDEs check the Maven documentation.
An alternative to this procedure is to have the m2eclipse plugin installed in your Eclipse installation to directly import the project using its POM.
Summary
This posts aims to show you the first steps to play and have fun with the jBPM5 source code. This will allow you to understand the insides of the project and eventually contribute new features back to the community.
Furthermore, if you want to play around with the designer and gwt-console you can invoke the ant install.demo command inside the jbpm-installer folder to use the demo. For more information about this check the project’s documentation.
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Hi, Just one question. Is it necessary to use JDK 1.6? Or it is compatible with 1.5? So that means that Drools 5.2 will only run in 1.6+?
the build works on both jdk1.5 and jdk1.6. It always produces 1.5 compatibile class files, but on jdk1.5 it doesn’t build the modeshape integration (a guvnor feature).
Hi there.. You can 1.5 if you want. There is no code tied to 1.6.
Greetings.
Don’t forget to configure the proxy before (if any) th command :”git clone https://github.com/krisv/jbpm.git jbpm5″:
The comman for configure the proxy is:
git config –global http.proxy http://your-proxy-login:your-proxy-password@your-proxy-ip:your-proxy-port
Enjoy;
Hi,
Thanks for the extensive instructions.
I am trying to run the gwt-console-client and gwt-console-server
in websphere 7.5.
First I am trying to just install gwt-console-server. I have changed
the persistence.xml to look for a data-source that I have defined
in websphere.
But websphere complains about creating EntityManagerFactory
for human task.
I have seen that there is a dependency on the human task component
but dont see a reason that it should be running in the web-container.
AT least that is what I understood.
After deployment I am trying to access the rest urls without any
success.
CAN YOU HELP ME WITH THIS.
Shantanu