topic Re: potentiality and limits of Activiti Engine in Alfresco Archive

potentiality and limits of Activiti Engine

deepyou — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 10:01:22 GMT

Hi all, I've some questions about Potentiality of Activiti Engine. The Problem that i'm going to show you is not for us just a simple technical trouble about Activiti but We need to know if is a Limitation of Activiti Engine or is our ProblemWe're going to develop a platform based on a BPMN Engine.

Re: potentiality and limits of Activiti Engine

jbarrez — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:13:55 GMT

The 'problem' you see is core to the Activiti engine. Indeed, the process you posted here will (sometimes) yield optimistic locking exceptions, if both of them are set to be async=true. This is logical, as there will be two independent threads that try to continue the process. In this case, the solution is of course easy to see, but in general there is no good algorithm to figure out if we can safely join or not.

You can set the exclusive to true, but you'd lose some of the concurrency you've introduced.

Re: potentiality and limits of Activiti Engine

trademak — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 07:56:56 GMT

As also discussed via e-mail, there's an opportunity here to leverage the Camel integration with Activiti.
I've created a unit test that shows how you can use SEDA (or JMS) queues in Camel in combination with a Camel service task and a receive task in Activiti to get your use case running.
You can find it here:

https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/blob/master/modules/activiti-camel/src/test/java/org/activiti/camel/route/AsyncCamelRoute.java

https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/blob/master/modules/activiti-camel/src/test/java/org/activiti/camel/AsyncProcessTest.java

Best regards,

Re: potentiality and limits of Activiti Engine

deepyou — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 12:52:24 GMT

"The parallel gateway runs every task in sequence by default and this is by design".
And this sound's good for BPMN logic but if you need real parallelism the solution with Apache Camel is a elegant and refined solution.

Thanks to all to clear my head about this doubth, Thanks expecially to Tijs Rademakers to all he did for Activiti community, first with his wonderfull book "Activiti in Action" and last but not least for the support that he give every day to the Activiti's users.

Best Regards
Gaetano.

Re: potentiality and limits of Activiti Engine

jbarrez — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:20:21 GMT

And this sound's good for BPMN logic but if you need real parallelism the solution with Apache Camel is a elegant and refined solution.

Yes, if you need 'true' parallelism. But I've seen very few cases where this was needed from a workflow and BPM engine. There are better frameworks to handle this, in my humble opinion (Camel being one of them). And that is exactly why we have the Camel integration 😉