The Job Announcement on the OpenShift PaaS cloud?

2013-04-26

Night Falls over Ponts, Lleida. Spain.
Night Falls over Ponts, Lleida. Spain. Photo by Rafael Cordones.

Last year Martin Schimak and me, came up with the idea to develop a showcase in order to have an application which we could use to demonstrate the advantages of developing business applications on a platform where business process are first-class citizens. That showcase eventually grew up to become The Job Announcement and we even ended up presenting it at the BPMCon 2012 in Berlin!

In March this year, camunda forked the Activiti project and launched a new product: the open-source camunda BPM platform and I could not wait to migrate the showcase to it! The migration from Activiti/camunda fox to camunda BPM was actually a piece of cake and I will blog about it in another post. This post will focus on the implementation of an idea that we got during the migration: what if instead of deploying The Job Announcement on "own" JBoss AS 7 server we push it to the cloud? We finally did that and pushed it to… OpenShift.

Why OpenShift? Because the offer both JBoss AS and JBoss EAP as pre-configured "application types" (in OpenShift's lingo) is quite convenient. I would nevertheless be very happy to hear from your experience deploying your apps on JBoss AS/EAP on another PaaS provider.

JBoss AS 7.1.x or JBoss EAP 6.x?

OpenShift offers both JBoss AS 7.1.0.Final and JBoss EAP 6.0.1.GA (AS 7.1.3.Final-redhat-4) application types. Given that the camunda BPM platform distribution for JBoss AS 7 (download) is built on top of JBoss AS 7.1.3, I went the EAP 6.x route. By the way, in case you are wondering why you cannot find newer releases of JBoss AS 7.1.0, have a look at this port this post which give some background on the availability of JBoss AS and EAP source and binary artifacts (thanks Bernd Rücker for it!).

the-job-announcement.com is now proudly served (though a bit slow due to the use of only 1 free gear!) by a JBoss EAP 6.0 running on OpenShift.

The following two posts explain the details in case you would like to deploy your camunda BPM-based process application on OpenShift:

UPDATE (2013-05-03): added link to follow up post. UPDATE (2013-05-14): added link to follow up post.