Alfresco Activiti is a well-known open source BPM (Business Process Management) engine which may execute business processes depicted in BPMN 2.0. The authors of Alfresco Activiti developed jBPM for Red Hat previously, and after they left Alfresco in 2016, they forked Activiti code and created another open source workflow engine called Flowable. Later, Alfresco Activiti was re-branded as Alfresco Process Services (APS).
Before Activiti, the market of BPMN engines is already very crowded, Oracle, SAP, IBM and many others offer solutions. There are even more BPMN diagram tools, such as MS Visio, LucidChart, MagicDraw, yEd and Sparx EA, etc. Among all of these solutions, Alfresco Activiti has its unique advantages, it’s an open source, Java-based, programmable, mature and well-rounded solution.
To understand Activiti, it’s worth to learn a little bit more of BPMN 2.0 through below links:
BPMN 2.0 Poster shows following notations:
- Events
- Activities
- Gateways
- Swimlanes
- Data
- Conversations
- Choreographies
Alfresco Activiti 6.0 can be downloaded from https://www.activiti.org/. Following Activiti User Guide, you may set it up in a few minutes. What I did is to download it, unzip it and copy activiti-app.war to tomcat/webapp/ folder. Restart Tomcat, access http://127.0.0.1:8080/activiti-app/, login as admin / test, you should be able to see the dashboard and start to play with the modeler. Left panel shows BPMN 2.0 notations though Activiti contains more notations which are not in BPMN 2.0 specification.
Activiti 6.0 implemented following notations:
- Events
- 5 Start Events
- 6 Boundary Events
- 3 Intermediate Catching Events
- 2 Intermediate Throwing Events
- 4 End Events
- Activities
- 10 Tasks
- 3 Structural
- Gateways
- 4 Gateways
- Swimlanes
- Pools and Lanes
- Artifacts
If you walked through above each link carefully, you should already have a high level understanding of BPMN 2.0 and Alfresco Activiti. We will dive into Alfresco Activiti data model and case studies more in coming days.
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