This post summarizes my thoughts (after a weekend of reflection 🙂 ) on the discussions about Process event bus, extracting the pvm and persistence that we had on friday afternoon in the Activiti Community Kickoff Meeting.
Ordered by priority:
1) persistence. If the runtime data can't be properly persisted, there is no point in starting on the other topics.
2) process event bus. Necessary for building up history, so clearly within the 5.0 scope. The only part that I didn't wasn't cleared out in the meeting was if the PVM should include event listeners. This had a small impact on the design of the events. I think it is best to have event listeners as part of the PVM. Another aspect is the name. Since it is one-way, I think the name 'listener' is better then 'bus'  I'll work out a proposal in this iteration for ProcessEvent's and ProcessEventListener. You can also build a proposal if you think that is necessary. Before the end of this iteration, we'll discuss and should come to agreement.
3) extracting the pvm is lowest priority and not a target within 5.0 for me. on the way back to belgium, I had a quick look and it seems to me that it is doable. I think we should create a jira issue for it and assign it to the 5.0.rc1. At that time we should evaluate if it is good to do it. If the other more important aspects are properly covered by then, then we can do the library split before 5.0.