Alfresco Previews Open Activiti BPM Integration Environment 
Alfresco, the open platform for social content management, has released the first preview of the Activiti Business Process Management (BPM) workflow engine integrated with Alfresco. Activiti is a lightweight workflow and BPM and will replace jBPM in Alfresco, officials said.
Alfresco, the open platform for social content management, has released the first preview of the Activiti Business Process Management (BPM) workflow engine integrated with Alfresco. Activiti is a lightweight workflow and BPM and will replace jBPM in Alfresco, officials said.
The Activiti integration, which is fully compliant with the industry standard BPMN 2.0, enhances Alfresco’s workflow features by giving developers more flexibility and integration capabilities for process flows between Alfresco and other business apps, according to officials. The integration is being offered through an update to Alfresco Community, version 3.4.e and is available for immediate download.
This Activiti preview release aims to allow early adopters to compare the existing jBPM workflow with the Activiti BPM environment as well as experiment with the integration into other tools to create different types of workflow apps, according to Tom Baeyens, Activiti Project Lead. The production-ready version of this integration will be delivered in the next major release of Alfresco Enterprise by the end of 2011, he added.
“The replacement of jBPM with Activiti in Alfresco is just the beginning. It’s the start of a seamless integrated environment that combines enterprise content management (ECM), adaptive case management (ACM) and business process management (BPM),” Baeyens said in a statement.
The Activiti BPM platform is available for downloaded here.
Alfresco Community 3.4.e can be downloaded here.
Inside Activiti’s Approach to BPM
For Better IT, Business Collaboration
Activiti is a lightweight workflow and BPM for business users, developers and system admins to deliver a powerhouse workflow tool to drive content needs from within the Alfresco community. It’s driven by a fast BPMN 2.0 process engine for Java that lets developers do more out of the box allowing for greater integration between Alfresco and other business applications.
Activiti also focuses to deliver special architectural features to promote better collaboration between IT and business stakeholders, he added.
In specific, Activiti supports the BPMN 2.0 standard, which performs as a graphical programming language that both business and IT people can understand. Moreover, with Activiti Cycle provides a tool to help IT and business cooperate on projects.
Other key Activiti features highlighted by the team include:
Event Listeners. Supports an out-of-the-box action, a piece of custom Java code or a script upon certain events in the diagram. This means that developers can decorate a process with extra technical details that don't show up in the diagram and improve IT/business collaboration because business users will not be confronted with technical aspects in the diagram.
Custom Activities. Allows a developer to write a custom activity in Java code that implements the complex behavior described by the business user when the description doesn’t match an activity type.
BPMN shortcuts. Allows developers to sidestep some of BPMN’s verbosity. For example a simple Activiti attribute might be introduced that will be equivalent to a more verbose BPMN 2.0 XML section. These shortcuts will not be proprietary extensions, and are always translatable to valid (but longer) BPMN XML. It's only a mechanism to allow for more compact XML descriptions.
The architectural base layer of the Activiti Engine, called the process virtual machine, allows for easy pluggability of activity types, features and complete process languages. The Activiti team envisions several candidate languages for this layer, including jPDL 4 and other domain specific process languages.
The process engine, designed to be integratable and extensible, sports these features:
- Allows user updates to be combined with process updates in a single transaction
- Runs on any Java environment (Spring, JTA, standalone, etc.), with any form of transaction demarcation.
- Easy to use setup utility
Built to support the cloud scalability - Simple to add new custom activity types and complete dedicated process languages
- Transactional timers
Asynchronous continuations; and - Ability to test process executions in isolation in a plain unit test </LI>
Activiti was launched last year as an open source project distributed under the Apache license.
