Configure explorer to use in 'real world'

[rafaelduqueestr]

Hi all,
I'm very new in activiti and workflow apis and my english isn't so good, sorry if there is a lot of errors.

I'm doing a POC to use Activiti at a government department in Brazil and I have any doubts about configure Activiti Explorer in a corporate environment.
I did the follow things:

1- I just read a activiti in action book (for activiti version 5.9 unfortunately);
2- Donwload Activiti 5.16.4 version;
3- Download a tomcat 7 version;
4- Download the activiti project in github (for study);
5- Copy activiti-explorer.war and put in tomcat;
6- I removed the properties: db.properties and engine.properties and put in classpath folder in tomcat;
7- I configure the property db.properties with the oracle configurations;
8- I configure the engine.properties to not generate demo datas;
And, it work fine, but i would like to use jndi lookup for datasource confguration, not use the variables directly in the db.properties.
I know I need to configure the context.xml (resource) in tomcat, but, how could i tell to activiti explorer to use this datasource?

PS: In the step 8, about the engine.properties, I found the properties only search in the source code, the documentation talks about activiti-standalone-context.xml, but I think this archive doen't exist anymore.

[jbarrez]

You could, using regular Spring ways of using a jdni datasource (the activiti.cfg.xml IS a spring file)

That being said, keep in mind Explorer is not a 'production' thing, we use it as a testing bed and there is minimal QA going on there.

[rafaelduqueestr]

Hi Joram, thanks for your reply.

Sorry, but after reading a activiti book and the official tutorial site I couldn't understanding about the ideia the activiti explorer. This product was created only for testing? What should i use the activiti in production, for example modeling and deploying processes? With I want to use the BPMS solution, I shouldn't use the activiti explorer?

I thought I shouldn't change the source code in the activiti explorer, only change the properties to make this product work, do you recommend to "fork" the code and change the spring configuration for my necessity? I think this isn't a good idea.

[jbarrez]

Activiti Explorer is indeed a demonstration user interface. Which means that we do indeed use it to showcase features of the Activiti *engine*, which is the most important part of Activiti. Many users of Activiti embed Activiti within their own UI, with their own technology.

If you want to use Activiti Explorer in production, you can. It's open source, you do as you please. And if you search the forums, you see many have done so.
But do keep in mind it doesn't go through rigorous QA testing and validation which the commercial offerings have.