In May this year we announced camunda fox as open source platform with the focus on Business-IT-Alignment leveraging BPMN. We announced Version 1.0 ready for August 2010. Now we have August, and we have something ready

But actually things have changed a bit. After announcing fox, I had a longer discussion with Tom Baeyens, the project lead of Activiti and the former project lead of JBoss jBPM. We know each other since I think over 5 years now (wow, time passes!). And we figured out we had pretty similar visions in mind. Tom and me agreed, that it would be a perfect synergy, if we put the energy and ideas planned for camunda fox into Activiti Cycle, the component of the Activiti BPM platform designed for collaboration, development process and Business-IT-Alignment. Hence we took over the lead for this component and were busy the last months to migrate existing code to Activiti and get started there.

But now I am pretty happy with this situation. We can concentrate completely on the fox/Cycle ideas and everything is embedded in the quite creative Activiti Team. And the best is: With the coming Activiti 5.0.beta1 on September 1st, we can ship the first preview of Activiti Cycle! So this is not camunda fox 1.0, but at least we keep our promise to ship And actually the whole migration and learning curve for new technologies like Spring SURF for the GUI took us the time, in which we would have done fox

First Cycle Screenshot with fox jBPM Plugin

But it was worth the investment, Activiti Cycle is embedded in the Activiti BPM platform, but not tied to it. Actually we already have a working project with using Activiti Cycle together with a jBPM 3 Engine . And the very liberate Apache license may boost usage possibilities. In camunda fox remain some special features: PEAL – The Process Engine Abstraction Layer (doesn’t make sense to have an abstraction layer inside an engine) and BPMN to jBPM 3 transformations (some information on that here), which use LGPL based code that cannot be included in Activiti. But the nice thing is, the camunda fox features can be easily used as Plugins in Activiti Cycle (see Screenshot), cool eh? Currently I am writing a separate blog post to show some first Screenshots and Features, stay tuned for it!

Activiti Cycle Team

So long I want to thank the Activiti Cycle Team at camunda to make the beta1 release happen, even if it involved some night shifts. And thanks to the whole Activiti Team for support! Finally we could proudly present Activiti Cycle in time. So now we have the foundation, let’s change history with it Or maybe I should get some sleep first…