Both the Activiti community and our consulting customers are repeatedly asking me about how to run Activiti on IBM WebSphere Application Server. In this blogpost I want to summarize the problems and challenges you face when you want to do that and along the lines give a sneak preview of the upcoming WebSphere support in camunda fox (our enterprise BPM platform based on Activiti).

Read on..

Recently my colleague Daniel pointed me to JBoss Openshift, an initiative from JBoss to jump on the cloud train, nobody can avoid these days. But actually there is something really cool in it: You can create and run a JBoss AS 7 in the cloud easily, having either H2 or even MySQL available as a database. After playing around with it took me a Saturday to write a plug-in for the cycle component of camunda fox. This allows us to create and run a process application containing a BPMN 2.0 process at a worldwide reachable URL in a minute Interested? Watch this short screen-cast…

Read on..

Since the beginning we joined the Activiti Project (an open source BPMN 2.0 Process Engine) and participated actively on the development. I even remember that I developed a first BPMN 2.0 engine prototype when writing our German book “Praxishandbuch BPMN“, see my (unfortunately German only at that time) blog post for that. Who would have guessed that Activiti gets that successful? Okay I hoped it and was pretty confident, but the current feedback is amazing. Beside Activiti Trainings and Workshops we currently productize camunda fox, a complete BPM Platform around Activiti, which implements our thoughts about Business IT Alignment (see for example BPMN 2.0 by Example: Incident Management) and “Less coding instead of Zero Coding” (see for example “Less-Code BPM” with camunda fox server, Activiti and JBoss AS 7). Now I get lot of questions about our role and relationship to Alfresco and this can be easily answered since 2011-10-31: We are official “Activiti Partner” now and keep on doing what we are already do

Last week I gave a talk about Activiti and Drools in Action at the WJAX in Munic, Germany, which is one of the largest and most important Java conferences in Germany. I gave a demo using the latest camunda fox server, basically a JBoss AS 7 with Activiti integrated. More than 80 people in a totally crowded room showed how hot this topic must be The whole stack allowed me to create an application using the Activiti Process Engine, JSF, CDI, JPA, EJB and the Drools Rule Engine in the train ride from Berlin to Munic, the required code is really pretty small. Today I uploaded a cast of the whole talk (but in German) and want to provide the link to the sources.

Read on..

Woken up at 4.30am, I am now sitting in the train, crossing Germany from Berlin to Frankfurt for a client’s workshop on BPM, BPMN and all the rest. Rather foggy outside, this seems to be the perfect scenery for finally joining the whole BPM vs. Case Management debate (maybe because I am in the mood for fairy tales?).
Read on..

We really looked forward to the release of JBoss 7 and in July the waiting finally has come to an end. JBoss 7 is now the basis for our camunda fox server, which we use to build “process applications” for our customers, which now are not only BPMN 2.0 standard compliant but as well Java EE 6; a very important argument for a lot of our customers. We now have the first such server on-line and running in our data center, and so far it runs and runs and runs…

Read on..

Yes you have read correctly: “less-code”. At camunda we are pretty sure that there are large classes of business process that cannot be implemented in a zero-code fashion (i.e. without having to write custom implementation code). So if we are taking away “zero-code”, but what we can do is offer “less-code”

Our experience in numerous process implementation projects has shown that one of the largest challenges in BPM, is defining and setting up the infrastructure. Getting integration right is extremely hard and mostly about nasty stuff like deployment, classloading, transactions, versioning, etc. So in order to be able to implement “features” or “business logic” (whatever you want to call it), you have to solve a lot of technical problems. But what if I said, that this is all in the past? What if I said that you could deploy a simple .jar file containing a process diagram and a couple of services and that’s it? And classloading, transactions and stuff like @Inject ProcessEngine just “magically” works? You would read the rest of this blog post, now, wouldn’t you?
Read on..

In my previous blog post I showed how we can implement human task management with activiti and activiti-cdi. In that post we configured the activiti process engine using a spring application context. Some people send me an email, asking whether we have to use spring or whether there are different options. There are. Please note that this post is not yet about “the cool thing” I am hinting at since last week but about something different (but still moderately cool ). In today’s (short) post I want to explore different options for configuring activiti cdi.
Read on..

A couple of days ago, I promised that I would unveil “first class activiti support in Java EE 6”. Today I will give you a first taste. But keep in mind: what I am showing below is cool, but: it is by far not the coolest thing we have currently lined up. So stay tuned.

Many of our customers embed Activiti in their own applications, in many instances to support task or case management. In such a situation we do not use activiti explorer but implement task management ourselves, tightly integrated in our application. Today I want to show how we can use the activiti-cdi module to implement human task management. The activiti-cdi module is an activiti contribution by camunda (I am the module lead) and we have made huge progress over the last months. In this article I showcase some of the features of the current trunk, which will be released with activiti 5.8 (released on October 1st). We will see that in order to create JSF task forms, in simple cases we do not even have to write Java code. At the same time, we have the full power of Java EE 6 at our fingertips, if we need more. So today, we are going to build JSF based task management in under an hour!
Read on..

Have you ever wondered whether processe-xml files could be picked up directly by activiti and deployed if they have changed? Or have you ever tried to use the same activiti instance with multiple applications and then invoke custom java code from the processes? We currently use activiti in a number of projects and often we get to a point where the default servlet-container-based configuration and infrastructure is not enough to satisfy all the requirements. Today, I want to briefly outline our technology stack for using activiti with Java EE. As with many of our projects, the stack is available open source for you to try out

Read on..