Tomasz Nurkiewicz around Java and concurrency

First, there was EJB 2.1 with countless XML files all over. It won't be such a big exaggeration to say that for every line of business code you had to create at least 10 lines of framework code and two pages of XML. Local and remote interfaces, manual JNDI lookup, triply nested try-catches, checked RemoteExceptions everywhere... this was enterprise. There were even tools to generate some of this boilerplate automatically.
Then couple of guys came and created Spring framework. After being forced to cast by obscure PortableRemoteObject.narrow() it was like taking a deep breath of fresh air, like writing poetry after working in coal mine. Time went by (BTW do you remember how many years ago was the last major JRE release?) and Sun learnt their lesson. EJB 3.0 was even simpler compared to Spring, XML-free, annotations, dependency injection. 3.1 was another great step toward simplicity, being more and more often compared to Spring. Logically current state of the art EJB specification mi…

I was interested in Activiti process engine long before it reached its first stable 5.0 version. Now, when 5.1 was released, I decided to play a bit with this framework, especially paying attention to Spring and JUnit support. But one of the first impediments encountered was the difference between process instance and execution, as well as between sub process and call activity. I am hoping after reading this article you won't encounter the same problems when starting with Activiti.
As you know, even a monkey can learn a new Java framework after reading documentation, but the real fun comes when you meet the technology by studying its source code (often tracking bugs and looking for solutions). And I must admit that Activiti code-base was a pleasure to read, nicely structured and designed. For some reason it is not deployed to Alfresco's repository, so to take full advantage of your BPMN journey, start by:
svn co http://svn.codehaus.org/activiti/activiti/tags/activiti-5.1 cd act…