Activiti Designer alternative for business user

[mukul423]

I'm trying out Activiti to see if we can replace our current approval flow engine with it. I have 2 questions:

1) For all Activiti projects out there deployed on production: is it a hardcoded fact that business/end users are supposed to make new business processes only using Activiti designer (following BPMN 2.0 specification)?

2) Is there a way that we can create a simple facade UI (a UI layer above Activiti designer) that can be easily used by business users to create business processes in terms of business entities they understand & then code wise we try to transform such custom process to standard Activity/BPMN 2.0 XML? This would thus not impose the need for the end users to learn BPMN 2.0 specification (if they need to consistently make new business definitions/processes on run time). I'm not sure if it's feasible?

[hari]

Hi,

Activiti Enterprise is what you are looking for.

[mukul423]

"Activiti Enterprise" requires paid license for use on Production - right?

[jbarrez]

It is with a paid license, yes.

However, I wouldn't say that with your requirements, enterprise is a must (but it makes some things easier)

1) No, Activiti has a web modeler too

2) This is indeed part of the enterprise product (the 'step editor'). However … one can build this on top of Activiti … but it would require quite some time.

[mukul423]

Hi jbarrez,

1) Can you send me more details around web modeler in Actiti please?

2) Is there any pre-built open source/free alternative available for the 'step editor' that you know of (that can be easily customized may be)?

[jbarrez]

1) There is an open source version in the V6 download. You can try it out at https://activiti.alfresco.com/.
For commercial bits, contact Alfresco.

2) Not to my knowledge. Not in the UI sense, at least. There is some prototyping in the activiti-simple-workflow module … but it's basic and only backend.