activiti-explorer vs. activiti-rest webapps

[jetztradnet]

Hi,

Activiti newbie here.

From the Activiti 5.14 download I deployed activiti-explorer in my Tomcat. The quick setup worked and I could design and run some workflows. So far so good.

Then I wanted to integrate Activiti with our application (a cloud orchestration tool). Triggering our API from Activiti tasks worked, but remotely listing process instances (GET /activiti-explorer/service/runtime/process-instances) from our app failed with 500 Internal Server Error and message "no router defined". Looking through the code it seems like the /runtime/process-instances route is not registered in this webapp (class RestServicesInit, which registers these routes, is not used in module activiti-explorer).

After deploying the activiti-rest webapp and changing the URL to GET /activiti-rest/service/runtime/process-instances my call succeeded.

I have now the following questions:
- are activiti-explorer and activiti-rest supposed to be deployed together? If so, (how) do they interact with each other? Where is the engine running or is it then running in both webapps independently?
- is it by design that RestServicesInit is not called in activiti-explorer? I need the UI, so this is the webapp I want. But I also need the REST api to trigger workflows and do other stuff.

I'm happy to try things or provide additional information if required. Thank you for your time.

Wolfgang

[suseno]

hi,
just sharing my experience using activiti.
I'm using both activiti-explorer and activiti-rest ini production.
Activiti-explorer is used to create process definition and to deploy process definition only.
i already design gui based on activiti-rest webapps using grails web framework.
activiti-explorer  and activiti-rest are separated webapps.
They work independently.
if you pointing the same  database connection for both web apps then you can interactively access the process from activiti-explorer and activiti-rest.