Open-source Java specialist JBoss announced a major update to its jBPM business process management (BPM) suite at LinuxWorld in Boston.

Sacha Labourey, JBoss chief technology officer, said new tools would plug into the firm's forthcoming enterprise service bus (ESB). "It's important to see how our projects fit into our overall service-oriented architecture [SOA] strategy and the JBoss ESB, which is an asynchronous bus that will have a plug-and-play architecture," he said.

Labourey added that the plug-and-play architecture would let software vendors replace particular features with their own. The new bus could help companies to orchestrate SOAs for particular conditions, and will be delivered towards the end of this year, he said

The new software builds on the JBoss jBPM suite of business process management middleware, Labourey said. "Today we announced that the JBoss Transaction Monitor, which we acquired last September from Arjuna and HP, is now available in open source," he added. The tool has been modified to fit the JBoss suite.

Labourey said that it takes a long time to develop a good transaction monitor and debug it, but the JBoss Transaction Monitor had now reached maturity.

"This was the first Java transaction monitor on the market, and it was used by Bluestone, which was acquired by HP, and then became the transaction monitor for all HP customers [so it has an excellent pedigree]. HP is still using it for its internal applications, and other companies, such as Tibco and WebMethods, are still licensing it from us," Labourey added.

A second addition is the JBoss Rules engine. Labourey said that JBoss acquired this project in the middle of last year and has taken steps to round out the product – for example by providing full support and training for end-users.

A third component is the release of JBPM 3.1 workflow engine, which delivers new multilingual support features. The new software is licensed under the GPL open-source licence and is available for free download from here.