topic Re: Upgrade Activiti 5.7 to 5.8 (5.9) into Alfresco 4.0.d in Alfresco Archive

Upgrade Activiti 5.7 to 5.8 (5.9) into Alfresco 4.0.d

angello0571 — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 18:36:46 GMT

Hello,I am trying to upgrade the Activiti's engine that has Alfresco 4.0.dThe steps I'm doing are these:1) I replaced the activiti's jar engine library and activiti spring library 5.7 in webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/lib with:activiti-engine-5.8.jaractiviti-spring-5.8.jar2) In the activiti-context.xml I

Re: Upgrade Activiti 5.7 to 5.8 (5.9) into Alfresco 4.0.d

afaust — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:57:06 GMT

Hello,

you can't simply drop in updated JARs, update the schema and automagically expect Alfresco to work with a significant new release of Activiti. The error you are receiving is about incompatible service interfaces. In order upgrade to Activiti 5.8 or 5.9, you would have to recompile the Alfresco Repository source code against the new libraries and fix any API issues in Alfresco source code - not to mention implicit or under-the-hood functional changes that might interfere with the way the integration has been implemented by Alfresco.
Unless you are a very experienced Java developer / architect and are unafraid to code with the internals of Alfresco and Activiti - or have simply too much free time at your disposal, which you'll probably need - I'd advise to not attempt such an upgrade. Even if you successfully complete it, you would be left in a maintenance hell, as you would have to support your changes yourself and probably would have to expect trouble upgrading Alfresco to the next version.

What are the significant new features of 5.8 or 5.9 that you would need in Alfresco? There must be a significant / worthwhile reason to upgrade and I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Regards
Axel

Re: Upgrade Activiti 5.7 to 5.8 (5.9) into Alfresco 4.0.d

angello0571 — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 18:27:27 GMT

Thank you for your reply and great explanation,

I red this article http://www.bpm-guide.de/2012/02/17/activiti-project-alive-and-kicking/ and I noticed there are good features for Activiti 5.9, and you are right, right now I have some free time "to do some experiments", and I wondered how it could be upgraded into the current version of Comunity, and it's clear that some or many Alfresco interfaces will fail, but You are absolutly right: "The maintenance and integretation will be so dificult".

Also I wanted to try if the Activiti Engine of Alfresco 4.0.d is able to parse BPMN process definitions designed with Activiti 5.9 Eclipse Plug-in. I tried to do that with a simple process definition and it worked. I guess the most of the main BPMN 2.0 constructs are available in this comunity version.

Best Regards.