A recent question in the user forum got me to write a guide for deploying jBPM3 to Tomcat: http://community.jboss.org/wiki/jBPM3onTomcat . I noticed there were several issues that complicated the deployment path, notably:

• The standard DataSourceRealm cannot accommodate the jBPM3 identity model. A custom Realm is required.
• Tomcat lacks many dependencies taken for granted in JBoss AS, such as JSF and Hibernate.
• Since Tomcat is not an EJB container, the jbpm-enterprise.jar module is inapplicable. The job executor has to be started through a servlet context listener.

The difficulties associated to describing and explaining such drastic changes led me to start a Maven overlay that dealt with the above issues neatly. This work quickly took good shape, so I will commit it under this JIRA ticket.