Persistence is an excellent way to maintain and resolve long running processes, as well as to release resources from an environment when they're not needed. We've seen that persistence is not a way to provide searchable information, but a way to provide a recovery point that is not directly readable by people. However, we've also seen that we can provide such functionality either by enabling object marshalling strategies and history logs, or by implementing our own strategies or persistence mechanism.

During the next chapter, we will understand how jBPM6 integrates with other types of entities, such as rules, events, and complex event processing, a concept we started discussing in Chapter 2, BPM Systems' Structure.