Is activiti a good fit for my use case?

[jdkida]

I just read through all of the intro docs and did the 10min tuturial on the activiti toolkit. I know it will be able to accomplish what i need and so much more, but i wanted to get someones opinion first to make sure activiti is a good fit and not a complete overkill.

I need to create a support/IT case workflow wizard, I will be using GWT(Google Web Toolkit) for the frontend. The workflows slides will need to be decision based and managers(non-dev) will need to be able to create them. However there will also need to be some custom decision event code where I will have some java code doing checks and tests to determine which workflow slide will come next.

From what i read Activiti sounds to me like a great framework to start with, it contains the tools needed so managers can create these workflows with a GUI based application, and I can create the custom unque test events when needed.

I just wanted someone else who has actually used Activiti to tell me that this is a good choice for my use case, and there is not a simpler helpdesk workflow engine framework i should use instead, (this is obviously gonna be just an opinionated answer).

I also feel that once we see how powerfull Activiti is we could use it in other areas… but for now, if I were to only use it for creating tickets/cases that helped agents troubleshoot an issue correctly is this a good fit?

Thanks

[felipe1]

I think my use case is very similar to yours. I have a JSF based app and was assigned to look for a BMN tool to integrate with it. I did quite a research before deciding to use Activiti, and so far I cannot tell you that I've made a good decision.

Here are some critical points for me:

1 - The user task forms are designed using the 'original' frontend technology (JSF that is). You can easily build your forms using GWT as well.
2 - The api is really easy to understand and is well documented
3- Very nice api for querying for processes and tasks

I do not use the Designer tool in production. The process are created by developers using Eclipse plugin. But I had contact with the tool during the learning process, and I can tell you that is quite a nice tool.

I have found some bumps in the way though. Most of the issues were solved after searching this forum, but I did found a couple of bugs that generated JIRA tickets.

For the stake of comparison, I have tried to use JBPM5 for a while, but I found it very, very hard to understand. The bpm api is mixed with Jboss Drools api, and it makes the whole thing just too confused - specially point 1 above.

[jdkida]

So to give an example for what I need to use Activiti for, is think of the Windows help system/network helper, or any application where it asks you a series of questions which are its control flow. I will also want it to do some automatic tests and checks, to try and help determine what the issue is automatically.

So its more of a Troubleshooting Process Model… is activiti a good fit for this?

[felipe1]

<b>So to give an example for what I need to use Activiti for, is think of the Windows help system/network helper, or any application where it asks you a series of questions which are its control flow. </b>

* The answers for those questions will be your process variables. The form that the users will have to fill out can be created using your native GWT framework and easily integrated with Activiti

<b>I will also want it to do some automatic tests and checks, to try and help determine what the issue is automatically.</b>

* You can use service tasks (http://www.activiti.org/userguide/#bpmnJavaServiceTask) to perform business logic, so Java classes can perform the automatic tests. The outcome of the service task can be used to control the process flow.