topic Re: Concern: Activiti enterprise version diverging from community/open source version in Alfresco Archive

Concern: Activiti enterprise version diverging from community/open source version

chuck_irvine — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 14:42:12 GMT

We are in the process of purchasing the enterprise version of Activiti. To become familiar with Activiti, I've been studying both the community and enterprise products and the community and enterprise documentation sources. I'm starting to suspect that these two products are starting to diverge so m

Re: Concern: Activiti enterprise version diverging from community/open source version

jbarrez — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 14:07:12 GMT

Chuck,

In my humble opinion your opinion is not correct. As I'm developing on both products, let me clarify:

- The orientation of the enterprise docs might be a bit more user oriented, but for example https://docs.alfresco.com/activiti/docs/dev-guide/1.4.0/ is clearly a dev thing.
- Everything that concerns the engine is open source and will always be open source. The engine features are 100% the same.
- Everything about BPMN / custom java logic is in the OSS guide. No need to duplicate that. Everything you learned from the OSS docs is applicable to enterprise (except maybe LDAP integration or the OSS UI's)
- The Step editor is an easy way for people to get started with processes. But our flagship is the BPM modeler for sure.
- The two REST API's are there to make the migration for people being familiar with OSS rest API easy. The enterprise public API is more powerful (eg when it comes to permissions) and one should favour that. However, we have many people coming to us telling that they already wrote significant logic based on the OSS rest api, hence why it is there.

Hope this helps clarifying some bits!

Re: Concern: Activiti enterprise version diverging from community/open source version

chuck_irvine — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 14:46:19 GMT

Hi Joram,

In this case I actually did prefer to be incorrect, except opinion may be too strong a word. More like "sneaking suspicion" is the case. I appreciate your input.

The one difference of opinion may be with regard to the REST APIs. REST APIs are just plain fundamental these days, I think. For us, a comprehensive REST API was and is probably our most stringent requirement.

My view of the ideal community/enterprise split is that the community functionality should be a subset of the enterprise functionality. This allows initial experimental development with the community product and migration to the enterprise product when transitioning to comprehensive production implementations. This, I would venture, is the case for the folks you mention what already have code using the OSS rest APIs. Luckily, we will not face this predicament.

Perhaps Alfresco should consider migrating the enterprise REST api into the core community product.

Again, thanks for sharing your perspective.

Re: Concern: Activiti enterprise version diverging from community/open source version

trademak — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 16:12:56 GMT

Hi Chuck,

With Activiti 6 community and enterprise will be more aligned, and we will migrate some enterprise REST APIs to the core community product. The new Activiti 6 UI is a subset of the enterprise UI and the same will be true for the REST APIs.
I hope this addresses your concerns a bit.

Best regards,

Re: Concern: Activiti enterprise version diverging from community/open source version

chuck_irvine — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 16:57:04 GMT

This sounds excellent, Tijs. Thanks