Friday, 1 April 2011

Activiti Switches To BPEL

[Update to avoid confusion: please check the date on which this article was posted]

Today we are announcing a drastic change in the project that we've been working on for quite a while: Starting from the 5.4 release later today, Activiti will upgrade the file format of all processes from BPMN 2.0 to BPEL.
Rather then considering business processes as a combination of manual and automatic steps, we came to the conclusion that XML, WSDL and XPath is the way of the future and a much more natural fit for large corporations. The things you can do in XPath are simply amazing.

We are proud to ship with this release with full automatic and seamless conversion of existing processes. Just replace the jar files and reboot your app. What's more, our eclipse plugin will automatically refactor your Java beans and add WS-I compliant web services adapters. But we recommend take a back up of your project before activating that refactoring.

With the conversion to BPEL fully completed, we now will start working on the mobile client. To improve usability by business people and at the same time simplify the implementation of our forms component, we'll build a mobile tree browser for XML documents. It will be available next month for iOS and Android. It's a really cool app that allows you to compose SOAP requests in a structured tree view. Those requests can then be sent directly into the new BPEL based Activiti engine. Also the app will allow you to browse your task list XML messages in a graphical tree with collapse and expand features.

We've upgraded our Amazon account to handle all the download traffic that we expect later today. But in case Amazon's download servers would not be able to handle the load, please keep trying and let us know.
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8 comments:

  1. Anonymous1 April 2011 at 10:23

    I really appreciate this decision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day

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  2. Unknown1 April 2011 at 13:36

    Way to go Tom! You finally got what BPM is all about! ;)

    Lets all drink a Westmalle to that!

    Cheers,
    Daniel Meyer

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  3. scott1 April 2011 at 22:13

    really disappointed you're not also supporting Meego and Symbian, Tom :)

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  4. Vinicius Carvalho2 April 2011 at 00:49

    I was really worried at first, and then I recall which day is today. Good to have a sense of humor. Not too good for the weak of heart though :)

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  5. hozawa5 April 2011 at 02:35

    I knew you'll come to your senses at last. You forgot to say that you're following Google's footsteps and hold on to the next version of Activi source code indefinitely. :)

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  6. John15 April 2011 at 00:26

    You got me hook line and sinker Tom... Well done!

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  7. Mehdi11 May 2011 at 13:35

    :)) At first I was shocked and consequently at a glance I googled BPEL performance and benchmarks and you know about the rest.

    However, I believe in a enterprise software, communicating to different channels (e.g. HTTP/RMI) and data formats (e.g. SOAP[DOCUMENT/RPC]/WSDL/JSON/Binary data) are in responsibilities of ESB systems not Business Process engines in the same way that BPEL follows.

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  8. Anonymous31 December 2011 at 18:19

    All the documentation still use BPMN as well as the tools. I didnt find any reference to BPEL in the documentation.

    Thanks

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