topic Re: Differences between Acitiviti PVM and jBPM PVM versions in Alfresco Archive

Differences between Acitiviti PVM and jBPM PVM versions

romanoff — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 09:03:40 GMT

Hi,I'm an Acitiviti newbie. My company is planning to use BPMN2.0 for certain processes, but it also investigates the possibility of building a custom domain-specific BPM engine and tooling arund it. Acitiviti seems to be a very interesting solution to achieve that. When it comes to our plans to bui

Re: Differences between Acitiviti PVM and jBPM PVM versions

tombaeyens — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 09:18:03 GMT

short investigation has shown that several open-source BPM engines are using PVM (e.g. Activiti, jBPM, Orchestra, etc)

i basically wrote all of those
activiti's pvm is the last one i wrote.
bear in mind that pvm is considered an implementation detail of activiti. so no stability guarantees are given on it.

Re: Differences between Acitiviti PVM and jBPM PVM versions

romanoff — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 09:34:27 GMT

Thanks for such a quick answer!

short investigation has shown that several open-source BPM engines are using PVM (e.g. Activiti, jBPM, Orchestra, etc)

i basically wrote all of those
activiti's pvm is the last one i wrote.

I guess this also means that this activiti's PVM is also the best one, because it is based on previous experience? Can you elaborate a bit more on its features? Does this one contains all important features of all previous ones? Or was something thrown away? Or may be you added a new important distinguishing feature that only Activiti's PVM has? If you could explain a bit more detailed the differences and which languages are supported (or can be easily added/ported from other PVM-based implementations) it would be very nice of you.

bear in mind that pvm is considered an implementation detail of activiti. so no stability guarantees are given on it.

That I understand. We are not against following this moving target 😉 But first of all, we'd like to understand better which flavor of PVM (if at all) should be our target.

BTW, initially PVM was positioned as a framework for building custom engines, which implied that its API is somewhat public. Do you say now that now it became a pure implementation detail and it is not advised to use it as a basis for creating custom engines as it essentially means forking it?

Re: Differences between Acitiviti PVM and jBPM PVM versions

tombaeyens — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:00:20 GMT

I suggest forking it and customizing it for your usage.
Examples can be found in the test suite