topic Re: Best practices for handling tasks from elsewhere in Alfresco Archive

Best practices for handling tasks from elsewhere

ritchieannand — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 19:55:35 GMT

I'm looking at Activiti to control a hybrid of people-oriented processes and automated processes, and I'm trying to figure out some best practices.Is the general tendency to try to put automated processes somewhere controllable by web service, so that a ServiceTask combined with a Java class of some

Re: Best practices for handling tasks from elsewhere

jbarrez — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 15:31:47 GMT

"Is the general tendency to try to put automated processes somewhere controllable by web service, so that a ServiceTask combined with a Java class of some sort can call out to it?"

It depends on your company and its habits. Typically people will use Java Service tasks. But in companies with a lot of REST endpoints, that'll be different upon.

"Is it frowned upon to have code controlling the automated process use the Activiti API directly?"

Again, depends on your use case. Activiti is very open and flexible and does not judge. If the use case makes sense for you, why not.

"… instead of trying to register them somewhere and get a ServiceTask to specifically ask about them, but maybe that would be better?"

Not 100% sure what you mean by this. I assume you mean polling from a service task?
That could be done (intermediate timer + service task). Or you could use queues that start process instances when something comes in.

Re: Best practices for handling tasks from elsewhere

ritchieannand — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 17:10:14 GMT

Okay - good to know that it doesn't matter too much.

We were discussing the other day about "pull" versus "push" semantics, and liked "pull" (which in this case could be a small program using the Activiti API to query tasks and do things to them) over "push" (which could be, for example, a ServiceTask calling out to one of our machines) simply because it's easier to talk to Activiti than to provide some sort of location service.

I gather from some other threads that people do Activiti clustering much the same way: just run it on numerous machines and have them go looking for work, as it were, instead of somehow registering them somewhere and getting something else to actively coordinate them.

One thing I haven't encountered too much and I don't know if it's appropriate is mixing workflow engines like Activiti with various messaging technologies like MSMQ or RabbitMQ to interact with other programs, but perhaps the state management in Activiti just makes those technologies redundant.

Thanks for the reply, Joram

– Ritchie

Re: Best practices for handling tasks from elsewhere

jbarrez — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 16:45:54 GMT

Probably because there are not that much problems with it, but to my knowledge, people use Activiti with queues like RabbitMq very often