topic Re: Is activiti a good fit for my use case? in Alfresco Archive

Is activiti a good fit for my use case?

jdkida — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 14:28:07 GMT

I just read through all of the intro docs and did the 10min tuturial on the activiti toolkit. I know it will be able to accomplish what i need and so much more, but i wanted to get someones opinion first to make sure activiti is a good fit and not a complete overkill.I need to create a support/IT ca

Re: Is activiti a good fit for my use case?

felipe1 — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 16:20:34 GMT

I think my use case is very similar to yours. I have a JSF based app and was assigned to look for a BMN tool to integrate with it. I did quite a research before deciding to use Activiti, and so far I cannot tell you that I've made a good decision.

Here are some critical points for me:

1 - The user task forms are designed using the 'original' frontend technology (JSF that is). You can easily build your forms using GWT as well.
2 - The api is really easy to understand and is well documented
3- Very nice api for querying for processes and tasks

I do not use the Designer tool in production. The process are created by developers using Eclipse plugin. But I had contact with the tool during the learning process, and I can tell you that is quite a nice tool.

I have found some bumps in the way though. Most of the issues were solved after searching this forum, but I did found a couple of bugs that generated JIRA tickets.

For the stake of comparison, I have tried to use JBPM5 for a while, but I found it very, very hard to understand. The bpm api is mixed with Jboss Drools api, and it makes the whole thing just too confused - specially point 1 above.

Re: Is activiti a good fit for my use case?

jdkida — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 05:19:54 GMT

So to give an example for what I need to use Activiti for, is think of the Windows help system/network helper, or any application where it asks you a series of questions which are its control flow. I will also want it to do some automatic tests and checks, to try and help determine what the issue is automatically.

So its more of a Troubleshooting Process Model… is activiti a good fit for this?

Re: Is activiti a good fit for my use case?

felipe1 — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 10:32:27 GMT

<b>So to give an example for what I need to use Activiti for, is think of the Windows help system/network helper, or any application where it asks you a series of questions which are its control flow. </b>

* The answers for those questions will be your process variables. The form that the users will have to fill out can be created using your native GWT framework and easily integrated with Activiti

<b>I will also want it to do some automatic tests and checks, to try and help determine what the issue is automatically.</b>

* You can use service tasks (http://www.activiti.org/userguide/#bpmnJavaServiceTask) to perform business logic, so Java classes can perform the automatic tests. The outcome of the service task can be used to control the process flow.