Duncan Child sent me a link to Business process automation made easy with Java, Part 1.

These days, severe market demands drive enterprises to reduce costs and increase shareholder value. In such an environment, businesses can realize significant cost reductions and efficiencies by automating business process flows, eliminating nonvalue-adding human interventions, and allowing enterprise applications to communicate and intelligently and seamlessly share information. In this two-part series, we present the technology building blocks for automating an enterprise, how those blocks fit within an enterprise component architecture such as J2EE, and how you can design and build a business rule engine solution based on this architecture.