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…

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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?
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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.
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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!
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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

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Lately and just in time for the Cebit – one of the biggest IT fares worldwide – we did a huge step in the Activiti Cycle development and can now proudly present the first working version of our BPM round-trip. At this point I want to stress again, that the vision behind Activiti Cycle is not about being a Zero Coding tool (see Making the BPMN Round-trip real for some more thoughts why Zero Coding doesn’t work in a lot of situations), but a tool which really facilitates collaboration between different roles being part of any BPM project. We accept that there are different tools out there, serving different roles with different needs and capabilities. The feedback at the Cebit and different User Group presentations was very good and seems we are heading in the right direction, but judge yourself

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Activiti was released in December and we already got quite some customers and see a lot of interesting projects starting, despite the relatively young project! Time to start an Activiti User Group, for the moment we concentrate on the German speaking area, where we want to organize some events with news and talks about Activiti.

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Remember the nice Seam 2 – jBPM 3 integration? We did it with Activiti and CDI. “We” being myself and Ronald van Kuijk, whom you may remember as  kukeltje from the jBPM days. The good news first: Now you can easily embed Activiti in your Java EE 6 applicaton!
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On Thursday I gave an Activiti Talk at the Java User Group Stuttgart in a pretty crowded location. I was told, more crowded than usual I was happy to speak there, since that was the exact location where I gave my first public jBPM talk years ago… Unfortunately I had to learn, that you cannot record a talk, if you don’t switch on your mic, so this time there will be no screencast available, but only the slides:

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If you are going to attend this year’s CeBIT (1-5 March in Hannover, Germany), and if you are interested in BPM, you should visit our booth there as well. We are located in Hall 6, Stand K02/13 on the joint area of “Jung & Innovativ” (young and innovative). Our neighbor there, Signavio, is also young and innovative – so why not pay them a visit, too?

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