topic Re: BPMN 2.0 and Activiti extensions in Alfresco Archive

BPMN 2.0 and Activiti extensions

walterjs — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:04:06 GMT

I've read a bit about BPMN 2.0 and XPDL and the pros and cons of both. One of the major problems with XPDL from what I've read is that it is virtually impossible to port a process from one vendor tool to the next, because of the multitude of custom extensions. Is this the main reason for using BPMN2

Re: BPMN 2.0 and Activiti extensions

tombaeyens — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 18:09:58 GMT

I think BPMN 2.0 is far better choice then XPDL. The whole industry is moving (or moved) to BPMN 2.0.

But the specification does not yet contain all executable details so that you can port process definitions from one engine to the other. There are always slight differences. Nevertheless this is already a huge step forward as now there are only slight diffs between all the BPM tools available now.

Re: BPMN 2.0 and Activiti extensions

tombaeyens — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 18:11:53 GMT

One more thing: some of the extensions we provide are shortcuts for which we also support the BPMN 2.0 standard more verbose notation. And only for features that are not defined in the spec we provide extensions that don't have counterpart in BPMN

Re: BPMN 2.0 and Activiti extensions

walterjs — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 09:20:53 GMT

Thanks Tom,

To be honest, I don't really care what the XML representation of the model looks like (XPDL or BPMN 2.0) as long as the modeling tools can interpret it properly and XPDL has all the constructs available to me in BPMN 2.0 (I've not used XPDL before, but it is the current default at my company).

I don't see the WebService integration piece on your roadmap although I've read quite a few articles and comments about it being imminent. Can you give any indication of when this will be ready?

Thanks
Walter

Re: BPMN 2.0 and Activiti extensions

jbarrez — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 09:02:25 GMT

Hi Walter, Esteban from MuleSoft is currently working on the webservice integration.

There is already a lot of working code in the codebase, but nothing is documented yet until we are sure about the stability.

Re: BPMN 2.0 and Activiti extensions

walterjs — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:18:08 GMT

Thanks Joram, I'll have a look at the code.