Jun 11, 2015
Why we Re-Implemented BPMN Multi-Instance Support in 7.3
Have you ever experienced bugs with multi-instance activities? You may choose from any of these: CAM-986, CAM-1731, CAM-2075, CAM-2338, CAM-2787, CAM-2897, CAM-3851, CAM-3925. From the engine’s early beginnings, its multi-instance implementation was more of a quick hack than a durable solution. Yet, it was carried from release to release, the pile of bugs and hair lost by desperate developers growing steadily. With Camunda BPM 7.3, we have refactored multi-instance fundamentally, drying one of the largest bug sources and fighting developer bald-headedness. This post provides insight into the engine’s execution model, two alternatives of treating multi-instance in that model, and why we believe our recent changes have dramatically improved the situation. On Process Execution In order to understand the implementation of…
Jun 2, 2015
Build your own Camunda task explorer with CDI and JSF
There’s a lot of interest in how to write a task list with CDI and JSF, and not a lot of up-to-date examples available. Until now! – In this blog post I’m going to show you how you can build your own task list with Camunda BPM Build a process application with JSF and CDI To get tasks into your task list, you need to build a process application that includes at least one process definition, as well as some user tasks. A recipe to build a JSF based process application can be found in our getting started guide. After completing the tutorial you’ll have a pizza order process like this: It contains a simple start form to start process instances and…
May 29, 2015
Camunda BPM 7.3.0 Final Released
I’m pleased to announce the availability of Camunda 7.3.0 Final. The release focuses on improving Camunda BPM for large production deployments. The highlights are: Process instance repair and modification: go back or skip ahead in a process. Authorizations: restrict access to processes, tasks and administrative actions. Search for process instances and incidents in Cockpit Starting new process instance at any activity / set of activities Tasklist extensibility and customization: extend the Tasklist Web Application with Html and Javascript based plugins. A detailed feature overview can be found at the end of this the post. Download For Free Run with Docker Register for the Webinar Process Instance Repair and Modification Sometimes process instances somehow take a wrong turn or end up…
By Daniel Meyer
May 7, 2015
Long running processes and service authentication – SAML tokens to the rescue?
When executing long running business processes which include service invocations you often have to solve a problem: What credentials should you use when calling the service? Let’s have a look at a simple example: A user might start the process manually. Then service 1 might be executed with the credentials of this user. But how about service 2? Should it be executed with credentials from the first user or the user who finished the user task? How about service 3? From our experience, there is no rule of thumb but it needs to be decided based on the project requirements. All of the three options are valid: The starting user credentials will be used for all service calls in…
May 6, 2015
Camunda + Liferay Community Meeting
Yesterday evening we met at our Partner Ancud IT in Nuremberg (Germany). Ancud presented their experiences using Portals (namely the Open Source Portal Liferay) in combination with Process Engines (namely Camunda :-)). That was already a topic in a recent webinar, you can check out the recording online: English or German. Afterwards we had interesting discussions about DMN use cases and a “social collaboration hub” research project. But let’s start from the beginning. Camunda + Liferay A process application needs a user interface. According to Ancud experiences this is most often a portal – or at least some home grown portal like thing. Personally I am not yet convinced as we still do a lot of non-portal projects – but…
Apr 24, 2015
Camunda BPM 7.3.0-alpha3 released
A new alpha release of our open source BPM and Workflow platform is available for download. The highlights of this release are: Process Engine Java and REST API Process-level authorizations: define ACL-like authorizations for restricting possible interactions with process-related resources (Process Definitions, Process Instances, Tasks …), in both Java and REST API. Deep tissue refactoring of implementation of Multi Instance constructs in process engine. Many, many bug fixes related to multi instance, event sub processes, boundary events and compensation. API for process instance repair: Modify a process instance’s execution structure through the ability to start and cancel activities in a flexible way. Job Executor Threadpool can be configured for shared process engine in Apache Tomcat Improved Error Handling: call activities…
By Daniel Meyer
Mar 17, 2015
New Camunda Workbench Release – Adds Stepping in Debugger
After a one day hack session, Nico and myself are proud to release a new version of Camunda Workbench. The Highlights of this Release are: Upgrade bpmn.io to v0.9.0 Create a new process Debugger now has stepping support Breakpoints after activities Display the type of variables Enhanced Script Editing What is Camunda Workbench? Camunda Workbench is the next big thing in browser-based tooling for BPMN based process automation 🙂 But most and foremost: Workbench is AWESOME! It brings use cases around modeling and execution of processes close together. In workbench you can model a process, deploy it to Camunda BPM Process Engine and then debug it in an interactive way. See for yourself: Camunda Workbench – Create and debug a…
By Daniel Meyer
Mar 11, 2015
Camunda meets Cassandra @Zalando: Community Meeting Write-up
Jorn Horstman, André Hartmann and Lukas Niemeier from Zalando Tech visited us yesterday evening to present their prototype for running Camunda engine on Apache Cassandra. They published their slides. Zalando is a “multinational e-commerce company that specializes in selling shoes, clothing and other fashion and lifestyle products online“. 2014 they had a revenue of €2.3 billion and currently have 8,500 employees (Source: Wikipedia). AND: they are Camunda enterprise edition subscribers and use Camunda process engine for processing their orders. Whenever you buy something in their online shop, a process instance is kicked off in Camunda process engine. Zalando’s current Architecture Zalando’s system needs to scale horizontally. Currently Zalando’s order processing runs on PostgreSQL database. They partition their order and process engine…
By Daniel Meyer
Mar 9, 2015
camunda-bpm-platform-osgi 1.1.0 released as a community extension
camunda-bpm-platform-osgi is a community extension that provides support for camunda Bpm platform inside OSGi containers. Ronny Bräunlich has just released a new version 1.1.0 of the library. Read the official release blog post and make sure to fork the project on GitHub.
