I need to work on a customer on boarding application. The workflow between various users can be implemented using JSF framework itself, with the help of faces confiq.xml I can specify the flow between various users. But here BPM is used with the help of webmethods tool. Does BPM is required always for implementation of workflow? What is its importance over normal implementation using other technologies?
Sassi,
in JSF you control only the pageflow between different UIs which can be part of a single activity which is performed by one user or or part of many activities.
A business process typically involves multiple people (participants / roles) and systems. The WfMS / BPMS for instance:
manages the task lists of the process participants
orchestrates the control flow between the different manual and system tasks
manages the process context information throughout the process (data. documents, persistence, versioning - ideally all ootb without coding)
provides rollback, error compensation features
creates an audit trail which is important for compliance / processes that need to be auditable (QA, regulators)
provides dashboards for operational monitoring
and reports for analysis and reporting of KPIs like averages process execution times or volumes grouped by different business data
allows you to model your business process in a graphical way, preferably in a standard notation (BPMN), which is much more user-friendly and a good basis for the communication between business and IT. The business will find it much harder to read the faces-config.xml.
supports the evaluation of simple or complex business rules to determine process flow and work assignment with user-friendly means
allows the
allows versioning of the process definitions (as if you had multiple faces-config versions in the classpath)
...
Find more BPMPS features and examples e.g. here http://www.eclipse.org/stardust/.
Eclipse Stardust is a mature and comprehensive open source BPMS which covers the aspects listed above and more.
There are lots of workflow solutions that are not a BPM system. However, a BPM system should always include a workflow solution. Presumably implemented by using a BPM notation standard and including kpi monitoring, business rules, simulation, user management, organization modeling and reporting. Although you could implement all those parts yourself in Java EE (with JSF) it would presumably take much more time.
Related
Hello we are trying to determine the best or appropriate architecture for tracking events as they occur between microservices. We know loose coupling begins this process for good microservice design. The use case is to literally query how a company's automation is taking place in real time or historically. There are many products such as Kafka, Solace, MassTransit (mediator, riders, message queues, sagas, routing slips).
Just basic advise at this point. We have to implement saga and routing slip patterns to satisfy our business model.
I would recommend starting by taking a look at the Open Telemetry (OTel). It's a CNCF project, so not tied to specific product, and their goal is to provide a level of observability across your architecture, including the ability of tracing across distributed apps (whether they are sync or async).
I will warn that there is currently a SIG focusing on defining the messaging semantics so this isn't a fully baked solution at this point. You can find more info on that SIG here. They are working to replace the existing experimental messaging semantic conventions with a stable document as things go GA.
That said, you'd probably want to start with instrumenting your apps/microservices and OTel has a number of auto-instrumentation libraries for different APIs & languages in various OTel repos. For example, the repo for the Java agent with a number of auto-instrumentation implementations (including JMS) can be found here: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation. The idea of the auto-instrumentation is that it doesn't require app code changes so as things evolve it should be easy for you to evolve with it, which is obviously ideal since the messaging semantics are still in work.
Agree with the Open Telemetry comment above. As far as what is currently used most widely (by any tech or framework involved) in microservices is its predecessor Open Tracing (Open Telemetry is backward compatible to Open Tracing and/as OpenTracing is also CNCF). If interested we have created a microservices workshop that uses tracing across both Rest and messaging (specifically JMS) so you can see working examples. You can view these traces in Jaeger UI and such. In the same workshop we show "unified observability" where we show metrics, logging, and tracing all within the same Grafana console. This is really handy as you can, eg, see metrics and/or get a metrics alarm/alert, drill down to its corresponding log entries, and then click/drill down directly from a log entry to its trace (and vice-versa). Full disclosure, I am from Oracle, and so we also show the ability to trace from the OpenTracing/Kubernetes layer, down into the database thus showing the "3 pillars of observability" across both app and data tiers ...but you don't need the database to do any of the other tracing, etc. shown. The workshop is here:https://apexapps.oracle.com/pls/apex/dbpm/r/livelabs/view-workshop?p180_id=637 and the src is here: https://github.com/oracle/microservices-datadriven . I'm definitely interested if you'd like to see add anything added or have any questions, etc. We'll be adding more OpenTelemetry to it as its adoption grows.
THE CONTEXT:
I should develop a software to calculate billing for a lot of customers
The software should be used by different local administrations, each one with its own rules to calculate the billing to its citizens.
At first i've thought to a workflow engine in order to "design" different calculation flows and apply then to the customers.
In the past i had a little experience with a workflow manager product (i worked a little with IBM BPM) and i had a lot of difficult to debug what happens when something went wrong and i found a lot of performance issue (respect to a simple OOP software).
Maybe these difficulties went caused by my poor knowledge of the tool, or maybe IBM BPM is not as good as IBM says.
Anyway, respect to my objective (produce a custom billing, and make it as flexible as possible in therm of configuration and process) is a workflow engine a suitable product?
Any suggestion about tools, frameworks and above all how to approach the problem.
My initial idea of the architecture is to develop a main software in c# (where i'm more confident) and using a workflow engine (like JBpm) as a black box, invoking previously configured flows into the bpm.
I would recommend using Cadence Workflow for your use case. It records all events that are related to your workflow in an execution history. It makes troubleshooting of production issues very straightforward.
As workflow is essentially a program in Java (or Go) you have unlimited flexibility on implementation. The performance is also not an issue as Cadence was built from ground up for high scalability. It was tested to over hundred million open workflows and tens of thousands of events per second.
See the presentation that goes over Cadence programming model.
I have been asked to start exploring a Activiti tool for some client demo.
The demo will also have JBoss Drools with which Activiti will be integrated.
I am new to both of these tools and business process world, so excuse me if the question is dumb.
The question is why do you need Drools? Isn't Activiti enough for the job?
Both of them have conditional elements so why do you need Activiti on top of drools?
This question doesn't quite fit the purpose of StackOverflow, so don't be surprised if you get a few flags. But I'll try to give a short answer.
Activity is a workflow engine, Drools is a business rules engine. They serve two different purposes.
Workflow engines are useful when you have a flow of actions of different actors that need to be controlled programmatically.
Rules engines are useful when you have business rules for executing some task automatically that you want to describe in a declarative way.
Both purposes are orthogonal to each other, meaning that the problem you have to solve may require none, just one, or both of them.
Imagine a workflow where a customer reports an incident, some experts have to work on it, and finally a bill gets produced, but no heavy algorithms are behind those tasks. That might be supported by a workflow engine without a rules engine.
Imagine a complex price model for a product, like cars having all sorts of special features that may be ordered. (Hifi speakers cost 400 €, except if the executive version of the car is ordered, where they only cost 200 € if ordered in combination with smartphone adapter...) Here a rules engine may be useful, although nobody talked about a workflow, so no workflow engine is needed.
Imagine the first example (incident workflow) together with a complex billing scheme. Here both tools may be used.
I wonder why these two types of tools are in some places described as perfectly fitting together. (Maybe this kind of claim motivated your question.) They serve two different purposes, and whether you need them both depends on the problem you have to solve.
I'm trying to build an claim processing system. There will be multiple variations of insurance policies (based on the negotiations with individual clients). Aim is to keep a base policies per provider and then apply variations to them per client to ensure easy maintenance of top level policies (like damage due to fire covered or not). The policies should be easy to be created by non-technical business users.
What is the best approach for this? I'm thinking on the lines of using Drools to come up with basic rules and then create jBPM processes per policy provider that will consume the rules. Guvnor for authoring and maintenance of rules and processes.
Assuming no human tasks (its going to be just a set of rules that need to be fired and results be thrown out), is using jBPM going to be an overkill? Are there better alternatives in the open source world?
Drools is already closely integrated with jBPM for use cases like this, so it definitely won't be overkill, they will work very nicely together. jBPM is not only about human interactions, it can just as well be used for automatic processing.
One remark, it might even be possible to not have one process per provider but have only one (or a small set of) process(es) and use rules to handle the variations.
I have a question about WWF, I'm working on a webbased ERP project which is a modular application ofcourse.
I'm looking for a way to create an engine for wokflows in the framwrok so modules can rely on it and based on this engine create their workflows.As I see there should be 3 kind of workflows (Human for confirmation of info among the organization, Business for handling business flows such as calculating personnel income based on the different factors and UI workflow for handling chain of usercontrols based on a cartable (dashboard) )
I need some help on handling this and if there is any problem in my insight I wonder to be informed.
This is extremely broad and without more context hard to answer.
WorkFlow can be used in conjunction with e.g. SharePoint to take care of the Human part of a workflow such as creating a document or marking it as OK.
WF can be deployed as a service and supports the interaction with other (web)services to support modularity.