BPMN Compliance

[jackmanbob]

Forgive me if this is one of those questions that has been covered a thousand times. I honestly searched for the answer before posting here.

I understand that Activiti is BPMN 2.0 compliant, but I wonder if it is only BPMN 2.0? What I mean is, does Activiti add their own flavor to the BPMN standard?

What I'm concerned about is that if our company invests in this product and it's development / integration with our systems, and we spend ungodly amounts of time defining all of our processes with Activiti, and some day, for some reason we stop using Activiti (maybe Activiti is merged with another company and uses their technology instead, maybe they go out of business, maybe company politics force us to move to another solution, *whatever*) and move to a different BPMN solution, are we going to have to rewrite/modify/tweak all of our files to work with someone else's software (because replacement solution X does not support Activiti's custom flavor of BPMN)?

If activity does have its own flavor, does it have a way to "export" to standard BPMN 2.0?

Again, apologies if this is beating a dead horse. If this has been covered, please provide a link.

Thanks!

[jackmanbob]

Bump

[jackmanbob]

Bump.  Really? No one?

[trademak]

Hi,

Activiti supports the common used elements of the BPMN 2.0 specification. The supported elements are described in the user guide.
Because we support BPMN 2.0 XML, you can use the process definitions in every BPMN 2.0 compliant process engine.
In addition to the BPMN 2.0 specification we have a couple of Activiti specific extensions, which are also described in the user guide.

Best regards,

[jackmanbob]

Thank you for the reply if we use the Activiti-specific extensions, is there a way to convert/export to BPMN compliance? Or are the Activiti extensions purely for Activiti?

[falko_menge]

All of Activiti's BPMN extensions are compliant to the BPMN specification, because they use the extension mechanism officially defined by the standard. So the question remains if you can use models with those extension in other BPMN modeling tools or engines.

The short answer is yes, because all BPMN compliant tools must be able to deal with arbitrary extensions. However, if the targeted tool or engine does not understand an extension made by Activiti, one has to replace that extension either with constructs that only rely on features defined in BPMN itself or with an extension that provides similar features.

Some of Activiti's BPMN extensions are just shortcuts for BPMN constructs that require too much boilerplate XML code. Those could be easily converted to a syntax that relies only features defined in BPMN itself, e.g., using XSLT.

Other extensions are specific to using BPMN with Java. Those are needed, because BPMN only specifies a binding to XML and Web Services. It could be possible to port them to other Java-based BPMN engines.

[jackmanbob]

All of Activiti's BPMN extensions are compliant to the BPMN specification, because they use the extension mechanism officially defined by the standard. So the question remains if you can use models with those extension in other BPMN modeling tools or engines.

The short answer is yes, because all BPMN compliant tools must be able to deal with arbitrary extensions. However, if the targeted tool or engine does not understand an extension made by Activiti, one has to replace that extension either with constructs that only rely on features defined in BPMN itself or with an extension that provides similar features.

Some of Activiti's BPMN extensions are just shortcuts for BPMN constructs that require too much boilerplate XML code. Those could be easily converted to a syntax that relies only features defined in BPMN itself, e.g., using XSLT.

Other extensions are specific to using BPMN with Java. Those are needed, because BPMN only specifies a binding to XML and Web Services. It could be possible to port them to other Java-based BPMN engines.

Excellent response! Exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!

…Some of Activiti's BPMN extensions are just shortcuts for BPMN constructs that require too much boilerplate XML code. Those could be easily converted to a syntax that relies only features defined in BPMN itself, e.g., using XSLT…

Does Activiti (maybe in ActivitiModeler UI), have functionality to do this for me? Or is it up to me to become a BPMN 2.0 expert on the XML level in order to create my own XSLT?

[ronald_van_kuij]

…Some of Activiti's BPMN extensions are just shortcuts for BPMN constructs that require too much boilerplate XML code. Those could be easily converted to a syntax that relies only features defined in BPMN itself, e.g., using XSLT…

Does Activiti (maybe in ActivitiModeler UI), have functionality to do this for me? Or is it up to me to become a BPMN 2.0 expert on the XML level in order to create my own XSLT?

Nope, nothing available in the moderler (does not even support the extensions at all) and nothing in the explorer. So for the time being it is indeed up to you to become an expert in that area (and contribute :-))

[ghollins]

Hi,

   With regards to the Designer (eclipse plugin) producing BPMN 2.0 compliant XML, I have a question.  I've noticed that gateways are lacking the "gatewayDirection" attribute.  I may be misinterpreting the BPMN 2.0 OMG specification, but it seems like this is a required attribute. 

Here is an example of an exclusiveGateway XML tag that Designer produced:

<code>
<exclusiveGateway id="exclusivegateway1" name="Exclusive Gateway"></exclusiveGateway>
</code>
Are there claims that Designer will produce BPMN 2.0 compliant/conformant XML, or is it more tailored towards producing XML that will work with the Activiti engine?

Thanks!

[geostp]

Hi ,

Does the latest version of Activiti is fully BPMN 2.0 compliant. Is there any documentation available which tables down comparative study
of BPMN2.0 notation not supported in Activiti and jBPM with latest version of the software.