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).

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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…

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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.

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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?).
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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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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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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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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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In a current project we develop an executable process. Hence, this process is a “piece of software”, which need to be tested. In software development this is common sense, so there are enough tools and best practices. Is that the same for technical process models? Hmm, not that easy. On the one hand we can use proved Java Test frameworks like JUnit for Open Source Process Engines like jBPM. On the other hand processes have some specialties, which aren’t surprising but somehow challenging…

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