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BPMN 2.0 and Activiti extensions

walterjs

I've read a bit about BPMN 2.0 and XPDL and the pros and cons of both. One of the major problems with XPDL from what I've read is that it is virtually impossible to port a process from one vendor tool to the next, because of the multitude of custom extensions. Is this the main reason for using BPMN2 in Activiti? I am very interested in your assessment of BPMN 2.0 vs XPDL.

With regard to the Activiti extensions, I see in the documentation that:

The prerequisite of such a custom extension is that there always must be a simple transformation to the standard way of doing things.

What is the "standard" way to define a activiti:formKey for instance or using an activiti:class in jBPM5 or drools flow for example?

The strategy that I've always used to create business processes in the past is to decouple the process completely from any "service code/rules execution" through web services. Is this still something that you would encourage with Activiti? Could a process be created in this way without using any activiti:extensions?

Thanks
Walter

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tombaeyens

I think BPMN 2.0 is far better choice then XPDL. The whole industry is moving (or moved) to BPMN 2.0.

But the specification does not yet contain all executable details so that you can port process definitions from one engine to the other. There are always slight differences. Nevertheless this is already a huge step forward as now there are only slight diffs between all the BPM tools available now.

tombaeyens

One more thing: some of the extensions we provide are shortcuts for which we also support the BPMN 2.0 standard more verbose notation. And only for features that are not defined in the spec we provide extensions that don't have counterpart in BPMN

walterjs

Thanks Tom,

To be honest, I don't really care what the XML representation of the model looks like (XPDL or BPMN 2.0) as long as the modeling tools can interpret it properly and XPDL has all the constructs available to me in BPMN 2.0 (I've not used XPDL before, but it is the current default at my company).

I don't see the WebService integration piece on your roadmap although I've read quite a few articles and comments about it being imminent. Can you give any indication of when this will be ready?

Thanks
Walter

jbarrez

Hi Walter, Esteban from MuleSoft is currently working on the webservice integration.

There is already a lot of working code in the codebase, but nothing is documented yet until we are sure about the stability.

walterjs

Thanks Joram, I'll have a look at the code.