As a Christmas present we got an assignment for developing a framework, which handles service invocation from processes including correlation support for asynchronous responses. And the best: We can open source it, so it will be available for everybody! Kudos to the customer (hopefully I am allowed to name them soon). In this post I will write a bit about the scope, the tackled problems and the targeted solution. An interesting side information: The framework will be able to work with different Process Engines. At the customer it is jBPM 3, but we plan to do a Proof of Concept with Activiti as well.
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If you are using JBoss jBPM 3 in your current process automation projects you may face the problem, that some stakeholder (business, analysts, customers, marketing, …) ask for BPMN process models. And they often do for a good reason. But how do you get to that world? Do you have to throw away the jBPM 3 engine and start using a BPMN 2.0 Engine like Activiti? If yes, how could a migration path could look like?

But there are good news: Your are not the only one having this problem Hence we already worked out strategies with some of our customers. One is to keep the jBPM 3 engine (at least for some time), but use BPMN 2.0 models anyway. Therefore we wrote a complete transformation and graphical tooling around it. And just in time for Christmas we open source it And together with some other ideas this leads you towards a step by step migration strategy, so read on…
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We got some positive feedback on the free Activiti-webinar we recently gave, and one potential Activiti-User located in Panama booked us for a web-based training. It has been kind of a crash course: About 6 hours, covering the most important aspects and giving the customer a kick-start.

And we thought: Hey, this could be interesting for other people as well! So we have set up two more dates for Online Crash Courses covering Activiti 5. Everyone interested (and willing to pay for it ) can attend. They will be provided by Bernd, CEO of camunda and Component-Lead of Activiti Cycle.

Activiti 5 Online Crash Course: More Information and Registration

We have recently been asked by quite a couple of customers, how to interact with Webservices from within a BPMN process (in Activiti) best. And – as always – there are multiple answers to that question Today I want to write a more technical post (haven’t done that for too long already) looking at the various options: The (verbose) BPMN 2.0 standard way, the (neat but Java specific) Activiti-Java -Extension and the (heavy) SOA/ESB alternative. And as always there are several nuances in between. To tell you that in advance: I am neither a big fan of the verbose standard nor of the heavy ESB way But let’s have a look into that in more detail and what it means for your architecture.
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Every user is different and for sure more different than a requirements engineer could think of So next year I am on tour in different Java User Groups in Germany in a couple of cities to present BPMN 2.0, Activiti, Cycle and our methods and ideas around it. On this evenings there should be enough time to discuss the approaches and gather the feedback from you, hopefully while having a comfortable beer As an influencing member in the OMG we can (surprise) influence the BPMN standard and as Activiti Core Team Member and Activiti Cycle Component Lead we can influence that young open source project as well. So I am really looking forward to these talks to get a lot of valuable feedback.

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The first official release Activiti 5.0 GA was released in time on Wednesday, high time to have a look on the current status and near-term roadmap of Activiti Cycle, which is still beta in that release (read why and how long further down in this post).
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