Saturday 30 October 2010

We're Almost There: Activiti 5.0.rc1 Released

We've added the last important features to Activiti and the architecture and API's are now stable. Next month will be mainly bug fixing to make it robust for production usage. Special thanks to Next Level Integration and Christian Muelder for hosting and setting up a complete QA/CI environment including all the databases.

We're very excited with the Spring integration in Activiti. You can configure your process engine in a Spring context like this:
<bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.TransactionAwareDataSourceProxy">
...
</bean>

<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DataSourceTransactionManager">
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
</bean>

<bean id="processEngine" class="org.activiti.spring.ProcessEngineFactoryBean">
<property name="databaseType" value="h2" />
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
<property name="transactionManager" ref="transactionManager" />
<property name="dbSchemaStrategy" value="drop-create" />
<property name="deploymentResources" value="classpath*:/org/activiti/spring/test/autodeploy.*.bpmn20.xml" />
</bean>

<bean id="repositoryService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getRepositoryService" />
<bean id="runtimeService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getRuntimeService" />
<bean id="taskService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getTaskService" />
<bean id="historyService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getHistoryService" />
<bean id="managementService" factory-bean="processEngine" factory-method="getManagementService" />
Beans can then be referenced just like process variables from expressions --even with parameters-- in the process like this:
<serviceTask id="createLoanRequest"
activiti:expression="${loanRequestBean.newLoanRequest(customerName, amount)}"
activiti:resultVariableName="loanRequest"/>
Highlights of this release:
  • Activiti Probe added Job and Deployment management
  • Event listeners
  • Query for process instances based on variable values
  • Parameterized method expressions
  • History details and audit capabilities
  • Extracted FormService and improved flexible form handling
  • Activiti config file from properties to xml
  • PostgreSQL en Oracle support
  • Improved DB performance by fine tuning indexes
  • Check out all 62 Jira issues of this release

By now, you should be as excited as we are about the release. I won't keep you longer in suspension and share the download link now: Go get it!

Friday 1 October 2010

Activiti Focus On The Alfresco DevCons

There's going to be a lot of focus on Activiti in the Alfresco Developer Conferences. There's one in Paris October 20-21 and one in New York Nov 3-4. So those are ideal opportunities to learn more about the new BPMN 2.0 Apache licensed Activiti project.

Use this special discount code for the Activiti community to get a 25% discount: AlfMeetup10