Pools and Lanes

[logic3]

How to represent pools and lanes from a technical point of view? I think Activiti does not support pools and lanes in its current release. if we use pools and lanes in Activiti modelor then how this information will be represented in activiti BPMN 2.0 xml.

cheers

[trademak]

Hi,

Right, it's not supported as it doesn't add technical implementation details for a process definition.
I even think that if you include pools and lanes that it doesn't work right now in the Activiti Engine, but that's a bug. It should simply be ignored.

Best regards,

[weissenberg]

Since pools are not supported, message exchange between them is also not supported, I think.

When I import the simple example below to Eclipse modeler, only task C and its event are shown,
the rest is ignored. When send/receive tasks are used insead of the events, "Unresolved reference 'flow3'" results on import.
(Activity modeler only supports receive task, not send task nor the corresponding events).

The IDEA behind the sample was to have task implementations run on different VMs, which exchange messages.

If I remove the unsupported pools (illegally), Web modeller does not report errors or warn about unsupported features,
but there is the same behavior in Activiti modeler.

Currently I think that Activiti is in a rather basic state. Has anyone compared it with BonitaSoft?

[attachment=0]pools and messages.jpg[/attachment]

[trademak]

Hi,

You can still do message exchange between VMs using the Mule or Camel activities.
But you can't model it using pools and lanes.

Best regards,

[gregglipson]

This is part of the problem with Activiti Modeler. Like Oracle BPMS 11g's free Eclipse modeler plug-in, the modeler thinks mostly of itself as an BPMN 2.0 Execution engine, and therefore doesn't care about modeling anything that can't be executed. This forces the modeler to turn to some other BPMN 2.0 tool to model pools, for instance, in order to specify end-to-end business process models for system of systems SOA/BPM solutions. I understand the desire as an execution engine, but why force the architect/analyst/modeler/developer to look anywhere but Activiti for BPMN 2.0 modeling?

Gregg Lipson
SOA/BPM Systems Analyst