deployment scenarios etc

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heymjo

Hi,

We are currently looking to standardize on a workflow solution in our organization so i'm going through the Activiti docs and trying out the demo. Next on my list will be Bonita and Oracle BPM suite. JBPM 4 is not being considered because of its dependency on JBOSS AS for the tooling (even though they claim it doesn't). JBPM 3 and OSWorkflow are equally not considered because old / unsupported / not standards based. That is the big picture.

So far everything what i've seen in Activiti looks very promising I have a few questions still that i'm hoping more experienced Activiti users or developers could help me with

- Is the toolsuite (probe/explorer/cycle etc) supported on Weblogic application server (9.2 MP2 or 10.3.x) ? I know it should Just Work ™ but has anybody tried it actually or is running it in a live production environment ?
- Is it recommended to have a process database per application (ACT_* tables in the application schema?) or is a single process database per organization with multiple applications and different workflows pointing to it equally supported ? The latter would require XA for atomic use case execution and from the docs it is not so clear if it this is supported currently.
- Can Activiti play a role in an organization wanting to move long term towards expensive buzzwords like SOA, ESB with the corresponding expensive tooling ? Will Activiti brand itself long term, as a component supporting SOA architectures or is SOA orientation not on the roadmap at all ? (I am not sure these questions make much sense but it is a consideration i need to address for my hierarchy).
- What is the role of SpringSource on the team ? (not really a decision factor just curious

BTW, big congratulations on the excellent work so far. To emerge such integrated toolsuite in less than a year is quite impressive and very promising for the future !!

Thanks,
Jorg

tombaeyens

- Is the toolsuite (probe/explorer/cycle etc) supported on Weblogic application server (9.2 MP2 or 10.3.x) ? I know it should Just Work ™ but has anybody tried it actually or is running it in a live production environment ?

Correct, it should just work and we're interested to hear if someone has already tried it.  It is in our plans to set up continuous integration for that platform in the future, but we didn't get there yet.

- Is it recommended to have a process database per application (ACT_* tables in the application schema?) or is a single process database per organization with multiple applications and different workflows pointing to it equally supported ? The latter would require XA for atomic use case execution and from the docs it is not so clear if it this is supported currently.

Hosting all processes into one single Activiti installation is for sure the easiest. 
With spring you can configure Activiti already to use JTA.  Depending on the app server implementation I guess this could translate to XA transactions.
We also have native JTA support (without using Spring transaction management) on our roadmap.

- Can Activiti play a role in an organization wanting to move long term towards expensive buzzwords like SOA, ESB with the corresponding expensive tooling ? Will Activiti brand itself long term, as a component supporting SOA architectures or is SOA orientation not on the roadmap at all ? (I am not sure these questions make much sense but it is a consideration i need to address for my hierarchy).

Companies like SpringSource (with Spring Integration), FuseSource, MuleSoft and are betting on this to happen and are participating in our community to make it happen.  Though it will take time before you can visually drag and drop services from a wsdl file on an activity in de eclipse designer…

- What is the role of SpringSource on the team ? (not really a decision factor just curious

They contributed the Spring integration.  Next week we meet up to define the next steps.