Activiti

Introduction

The Activiti has a clear origin in the jBPM project of JBoss. The former lead developers of jBPM, Tom Baeyens and Joram Barrez, created a vibrant community around this process engine and they created a process virtual machine sub-project that enabled jBPM to be used for multiple process languages. At that point in time Alfresco was using jBPM in their document management system for the implementation of foremost workflow related functionality. But they were looking for a process engine with a more liberal open source license. ventually Alfresco decided to create a liberal Apache licensed open source process engine themselves and contacted Tom and Joram. Activiti was born! The Activiti project started off at a very fast pace and succeeded to do a monthly release of the tool stack until the stable 5.0 release in December 2010.

Activiti vs. jBMP

My personal impression is that Activiti seems much more the logical continuation of jBPM, then jBPM5 is. This article concludes that the opportunities of both BPMS are nearly identical.

Installation

• extract activiti-5.4.zip to C:\Uwes\java\Activiti\activiti-5.4
• C:\Uwes\java\Activiti\activiti-5.4\setup\ant demo.start
• set CATALINA_HOME=C:\Uwes\java\Activiti\activiti-5.4\apps\apache-tomcat-6.0.32
• download eclipse 3.6.2 (helios) and extract to C:\Uwes\eclipse\v362_classic\

Eclipse Plug-In

• as decribed in Documentation to local eclipse 3.6.2 classic

Ant targets

• demo.start
• deom.stop
• tomcat.start
• tomcat.stop
• h2.start
• h2.stop
• db.drop
• db.create

Running Activiti

C:\Uwes\java\activiti\5.0\setup\ant (default target is demo.start) starts h2-DB on port 9092 and tomcat on port 8099. Other targets are tomcat.start, tomcat.stop, h2.start, h2.stop, db.drop, db.create.

Documentation

• Local Documentation file:///C:/Uwes/java/Activiti/5.0/docs/userguide/index.html
• Activite Home Documentation http://www.activiti.org/userguide/index.html

Architecture

As Activiti is 'just a jar', it can be embedded in any Java environment: with swing or on a Tomcat, JBoss, WebSphere, etc. Or you could very well choose to run Activiti as a typical, standalone BPM server.

Components

see sheet Activiti

• Eplorer: work item list
• Probe: admin area
• Cycle: business it alignment
• Modeler: modeling tool
• Designer: eclipse plugin modeling tool, started and maintained by Tijs Rademakers, Tiese Barrell, Ron van Liempd and Yvo Swillens.

Initial Tests

Eclipse based Tutorial

• http://activiti.org/designer/update/
• just read but modeling via Modeler seams more reasonable

Pizza Tutorial

• http://java.dzone.com/articles/tutorial-devoxx-activiti-bpmn?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+javalobby%2Ffrontpage+%28Javalobby+%2F+Java+Zone%29
• still to be done

Blog

Didn't work because of missing class.

Resources

• C:\Uwes\Documents\Software_Development\Modeling\BusinessProcessModeling\BPM.vsd
• C:\Uwes\Documents\Software_Development\Modeling\BusinessProcessModeling\Activiti\ActivitiInAction.pdf