Will Activiti Meet the BPM Challenge?
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According to Scott Francis despite successes of open source BPM projects such as JBoss jBPM, ProcessMaker, Apache ODE, Intalio and BonitaSoft, up until recently commercial vendors have been dominating BPM software landscape. In his opinion, this is due to the fact that
BPM is a different animal than many other software categories-user experience is critical; the problem-space is wide, rather than narrow; and it requires seamless coordination of many different activities, rather than just a few activities. Add to that, the standards and specifications hadn’t firmed up yet, as they had for databases.
But, as Francis notes, the environment is evolving:
- BPMN 2.0 provides what might be the first standard that is complete enough for open source software to use as a basis for competing with the commercial vendors
- User Interface software development tools have improved. It is easier to produce visually appealing applications that run inside a browser than it ever was before (thanks to HTML 5, AJAX, and several libraries built to leverage both).
- The cloud makes potential deployment of complicated software components easier to manage.
And this creates an opportunity for a new wave of open source BPM projects. The latest of them, - Activiti, was announced just last week.
One of the distinguishing features of the Activiti project, according to Sandy Kemsley, is that:
They believe that BPEL will be replaced by BPMN for most general-purpose BPM applications, with BPEL being used only for pure service orchestration... Although they are only supporting a subset of the BPMN 2.0 standard now - which could be said of any of the process modelers out there, since the standard is vast - they are committed to supporting the full standard, including execution semantics and the interchange format.
Tom Baeyens, Alfresco’s BPM Chief Architect and project lead, has expressed some of the goals of the Activity project:
The first target of Activiti is to achieve the same developer friendliness that we established at jBPM... Thanks to the Process Virtual Machine design, apart from BPMN 2.0, Activiti will also be able to support other process Domain Specific Languages (DSL)... our ambition is to build the clear #1 BPM engine.
Peter Hilton from Lunatech Research sees a lot of potential in Activiti:
Activiti starts a new generation of business process management (BPM) software that will disrupt the existing BPM engine landscape. Activiti promises to be the ideal choice for using BPM in commercial application development, because it is both based on open-standards and distributed under a liberal open-source license. More than anything else, these two aspects of Activiti make it more interesting for commercial software development than either other open source BPM platforms that have more restrictive licenses, or closed-source commercial offerings that carry the heavy price of vendor lock-in.
Francis considers that the focus of Activiti is on:
... embedding the engine inside other software - and on more liberal licensing terms (Apache license) that should make it easier for software companies to adopt it. And I think the market is ripe for an open source BPM platform that leverages standard underlying technologies and is built from the beginning to allow for cloud-based deployment. I think they’re off to a good start to create something that is really developer-friendly.
Which causes a negative reaction from Active endpoints:
BPM is a management discipline... That means that not every process ends up being automated. Of those that do... it makes no sense - none whatsoever - for those to be automated inside another type of product. Instead, the real opportunity for BPMSs is to allow the extended development team to break down the design barriers of ECM, CRM, ERP, PLM and other application types to focus on the core business process. The desired process model is, literally, "above" the constraints and assumptions of the containing systems.
Activiti is definitely a very strong new player in the open source BPM arena. It will become even stronger providing that BPMN 2.0 will really become not only a notation, but a de facto BPM execution language.
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Drools Flow, BPMN2, Apache License
by
Mark Proctor
For those interested, I put together a few previous blog articles as part of an overview:
blog.athico.com/2010/05/drools-flow-overview-an...
Mark
Drools Project Lead
blog.athico.com/
Look at the industry consolidation
by
peter lin
I have doubts BPMN 2.0 will make that big of a difference.
my bias 2 cents.
Meet Tom in Person - talking the first time about activit
by
Stefan Klose
www.next-level-b2b.com/lr/web/b2b/activiti
More BPM failures
by
Jean-Jacques Dubray
"BPM is a management discipline... "
by
Bernd Ruecker
We strongly believe, that developing Software in the field of BPM will change a lot! This is not about Zero-coding, there will be a completely new way of collaboration in BPM projects in feature! My college Jakob and me just blogged on some of our ideas the last days:
- www.bpm-guide.de/2010/05/24/bpmn-just-do-it/
- www.bpm-guide.de/2010/05/27/making-the-bpmn-rou...
And we work on a tooling to support this new Agile BPM vision with camunda fox (fox.camunda.com), which will push Open Source BPM to the next level and overcome Alex concerns :-)
But why?
by
Richard Clayton
Activiti doesn't exist yet, however, it is now a "strong contender for dominating Open Source BPM"? If jBPM was any sign of how what Activiti might look like, no thank you. I think we also have to ask why we need another BPM solution? After evaluating a number of the Open Source BPM offerings, I see the dominant solution being Drools Flow; the "Business Logic Integration Platform" (Rules Engine, BPM and Complex Event Processing all in one) is far more compelling than plain old BPM.
Re: But why?
by
Richard Clayton
Re: But why?
by
Maurizio Turatti
jBPM is a very good product but it lacks a modern authoring environment, Activiti is focused on BPMN 2.0 with a strong web-based graphical editor (Signavio). I think the combination BPM + ECM is one of the most important in the enterprise, to enable documentation workflows easily.
At present Activiti is in alpha stage, we'll see in few months if it can maintain its promises. Seeing is believing.
Re: But why?
by
peter lin
Re: But why?
by
Richard Clayton
Re: But why?
by
peter lin
Honestly, the BPM framework really doesn't matter. There's already a lot of them and the differences aren't going to persuade managers or executives. To a developer those differences "may" matter, but at the end of the day the manager only cares about the final result. I've seen several different BPM products for Java and .NET and tried a few. Many people have said this already, but it's clear that stand-alone BPM is dead.