A couple newbie questions on Activiti.

[simonsharry]

Hi,

I have a couple of newbie questions on Activiti.

1. I'm unable to understand how to seamlessly and – ideally automatically – integrate Activiti's forms and UI inside another, pre-existing Grails-based application. By 'seamlessly' I mean ensuring that Activiti-generated forms and UI have a look and feel that is identical to the main application (that is using Activiti in just a small portion of it).

Could someone please point me in the right direction?

2. What I additionally cannot seem to understand and appreciate is how Activiti (and even process modeling for that matter), that sort of employs a whole programming language in its own right (that maybe is only XML-based but still a language of sorts!) to define processes, going to make me productive as a programmer. I do fully understand that Activiti would provide me with an out-of-box persistent state management functionality. But other than this, what else would I as a programmer be missing if I were to not use Activiti? It seems to me that I could perhaps stay within the language/framework of my host application (which is Groovy+Java+Grails) and make aggressive use of object-orientation, AOP, and meta-programming techniques to come up with 'something' that would quickly allow me to model business processes.

So, basically, I'm seeing not much point in the effort of partitioning my solution part into Java/Groovy/Grails (the platform used by my host application) and part into Activiti when the latter doesn't allow its automatic blending into my host application's UI and so which I must manually carry out.

Would greatly appreciate if someone could clarify what I'm missing above in my understanding of Activity and BPMN in general. Note that I will have no use-cases of Activiti being used by non-programmers in my organization. Meaning, no use of Activiti Modeler by business staff; only use of Activiti Designer or even raw XML-editing by programmers!

Many thanks in advance,
/HS

[ronald_van_kuij]

1:you can't. Simply because that is not the intention of the ui part. Creating your own forms in your ui technology and referencing them via the formkey is easier. I do it with xforms and jsf forms. And no, I don't use formproperties.

2: well, a DSL, yes a language it is, is always easier to use to discuss things with the business/client/customer. It's like having semi-executable specs… Why do people use xml or edifact… Because it suites the needs better than plain text. And yes, you have to learn some new 'concepts', true…

Ever tried to discuss process definition written in java code? Have a picture for this? And if you start with a simple vacation request process, it looks simpler, but if it is about more complex processes it becomes unmanagable in any normal programming language etc, even with meta programming techniques… Believe me, I've been there… There IS a valid reason why projects lie Activiti exist. And it is more than state management… It's about gateways, task management, lots of workflow patterns etc…

Question from my side: do you want to use something like Activiti, or is someone 'forcing it on you' and are you trying to find reason not to use it? That is the impression I get a little from your questions, but I might be wrong.