I'm trying to select an open BPMN tools for my project,
I found Infinity/Stardust from Eclipse and Activiti.
What are the differences/advantages between these BPMN tools ?
When comparing BPMS one usually needs to consider the particular project requirements and situation. I cannot cover all aspects here, but let me add some thoughts.
A very significant difference between Activiti and Stardust is certainly the size and maturity of the code base. The Stardust code base is more than 5 times the code base of Activiti. Under the hopefully fair assumption that the Stardust team is not coding 5 times less efficiently, Stardust is more feature rich.
Some statistics from Ohloh (#see https://www.ohloh.net/p/eclipse-stardust and https://www.ohloh.net/p/activiti):
Activiti has had 4,388 commits made by 79 contributors representing 438,155 lines of code
Stardust has had 8,312 commits made by 38 contributors representing 2,538,729 lines of code
Activiti took an estimated 116 years of effort (COCOMO model) starting with its first commit in June, 2010 ending with its most
recent commit 3 days ago
Stardust took an estimated 726 years of effort (COCOMO model) starting with its first commit in December, 2011 ending with its most
recent commit 7 days ago
Activiti has a codebase with a long source history maintained by a
very large development team with increasing Y-O-Y commits
Stardust has a young, but established codebase maintained by a
very large development team with stable Y-O-Y commits
Both products originate from the Java world. Activiti seems to keep focusing primarily on the Java community and is sometimes positioned as BPMS for primarily for Java developers. Stardust has invested strongly into interoperability with the .NET world and is also targeting an audience that is not too familiar with Java, for instance with the web modeler. (SunGard has a number of .NET products that it integrates with the commercial Stardust version).
Activiti has a young code base and was designed for BPMN2. Stardust has a 13+ years old code base and is gradually supporting more and more BPMN2 elements.
Greg Harley's comment is not entirely correct.
there is still a commercial product of Stardust, the Infinity Process Platform (IPP). the code bases are synchronized and merged regularly. Both version have no license fees. Support from SunGard is available for the commercial code base. In terms of functionality and maturity Stardust and IPP are almost equivalent.
As a startup CARNOT had its primary market in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and additional traction in the Americas. After the acquisition SunGard rebranded CARNOT to Infinity Process Platform. So it has always been available as a standalone product, recently also hosted and as a Paas/Saas offering. In the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2007 SunGard was ranked 2nd in vision with a strong ability to execute. Later SunGard was not included in the Gartner quadrant anymore because SunGard is primarily offering products to the Finanacial Servcies and Energy industry. IPP is embedded in more than 60 SunGard products and has hundreds of installations worldwide.
Activity has a diverse group of committers and an active community. Some strong contributors like the founder and project lead Tom Baeyens or those from Camunda recently left the Community and started/forked new projects.
Stardust was first release in Summer 2013 in the Eclipse Kepler release. Hence so far its community is young and not very divers at this time. There has been significant growth during the last few months though.
Activiti is under the Apache license. Stardust is under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).
Related
It's over a year that we have had a commit for QueryDSL.
https://github.com/querydsl/querydsl
Shall we consider this project Dead or is it moving to a new group? I guess the old team have no plan to maintain it anymore. New JDKs arrive every 6 months and I guess this project will be out of date sooner than we expect. Any news or compatible alternative?
I joined the querydsl team several years ago but lost interest due to the time constraints of having a full time dev job. I am however still a member of their Slack workspace and as of today, no-one has posted in the #general channel since July 2018. When I was active, the channel was busy most, if not every day.
I'm led to believe that Timo Westkämper (owner) is too busy / has lost interest, as with most (all?) other devs excluding Ruben Dijkstra who has contributed a great deal towards the project but is busy with University. He intends to come back. I heard that Atlassian started contributing but there was no-one to up-skill them and deal with their prs, so they ducked out.
In summary, AFAIK, no-one is working on the project and it would appear the owner has lost interest. I'm considering JOOQ but worry it's somewhat of a one-man-band too. If Lukas moves on, we could be in a similar situation.
I think querydsl is a great tool and it's free for all RDBMS, compared with better maintained JOOQ. In my personal opinion, I'd like to see, minimally, querydsl-sql forked by the open source community, its dependencies reduced (it brings in a lot for what it is) and its Java version brought up to date. Perhaps querydsl-jpa could follow. These, IMO, are by far the most used jars and the more specialised functionality could be dropped, E.G.
querydsl-collections
querydsl-hibernate-search
querydsl-jdo
querydsl-lucene*
querydsl-mongodb
querydsl-scala
querydsl-spatial
querydsl-sql-spatial
querydsl-sql-spring
UPDATE
Timo has approved the handover of the project.
UPDATE
The querydsl team is back in action with querydsl 4.2.2 in Maven central as of 22-Nov-2019 and querydsl 5 in the pipeline. Thank you to the new team members for breathing life into this excellent project.
Rarely in an organization's lifetime is it easy to choose development platforms. Now is the time for my startup - we have to commit to a version control platform / service and set up some form of ticketing and project planning.
Every year brings new developments in these fields so I feel justified in asking what may well be a FAQ. My question is specific to:
Now (mid 2011)
A small software startup (1-2 developers) but likely to grow
Very low cost (especially to start with)
The latest trends seem to be distributed version control with git and mercurial front runners. And in 2011, it seems no-one hosts their own version control - just pay monthly for the service. Amalgamation of issue tracking and planning/estimation is another current theme, with this also hosted in the cloud.
Right now I am thinking of a paid, private github repo for source control - this would make it easier to bring open source developers into the team. And FogBugz for issue tracking/planning - I'm impressed by the UI and evidence-based milestone estimation.
So my question in a nutshell: what are the forerunners for version control and planning in 2011? What are the themes that are shaping this space?
Pick the ones that you think might work, try them out (most options have a "trial" if they are not free services), and then go with what works for your team. The best way to figure out what works is to try it.
My recommendation is to start with the simplest things you can and only add additional tools if you need them (try them out, sure, but don't require their use). The overhead of most tools is very large for small teams just starting out. Focus on your business value-added items. Time and effort spent working with / configuring various tools is time you are not building things your customers want.
That said, use whatever tools you are used to using right now, and build out from there. Go with the strengths of your team first, and then look to remove pain points as you go.
I do a lot of TDD and am thinking of installing a Continuous Integration Plugin for Eclipse.
The two most popular seem to be JUnit Max and Infinitest.
As both are "payed for", I'd like some opinions on the pros/cons/otherwise of each. Maybe there is a "free" alternative that I've missed?
Note: as mentioned by Kent Beck himself, the JUnit Max project is no longer actively developed. This blog post summarizes it (July 2009):
I wrote about JUnit Max in a previous post. In that post I commented that I was not sure if people were willing to pay $2/month for it. It turned out that I was right. Kent Beck just announced that he has deadpooled JUnit Max.
Ken adds:
The conundrum I faced was how to market without any cash.
I do have my reputation–people will (briefly) listen to what I say. That’s why I used the media I used. Actually, if I had to do it over again I would attach my name less prominently to the product.
Some people bought Max because it was a tool I produced, not because it was a tool they really thought they needed, and that delayed clear feedback. The signal that clinched the decision to deadpool Max was the lack of word-of-mouth. Subscribers were telling their friends, but their friends weren’t buying.
That being said, he is planning to get JUnit Max back, as he said himself in a vlog interview last week (July 2d, 2010): (new release mid or end July?).
So, right now, for large workspaces with many large projects, Infinitest might scale better. (I have no direct experience with it).
It isn’t open source, but for personal use it should be possible get a free-of-charge individual license. (see the dual-licensing model for Infinitest).
We have a small 3 developer team that is currently using Subversion for our source control. We expect the team to group to 8 members within the next 6 to 12 months. We are considering changing our source control to either TFS or Mercurial for improved branching. I know TFS is overkill for just branching, but that is the immediate need, and the other features of TFS could aid our team. One of our main concerns with TFS is we've heard that there is a lot of overhead deploying it, especially on a small team. I'm hoping to get some community insight into just how much overhead there may be involved, suggestions to make the process easier, and anything else the community may feel is useful in making the decision to implement.
In my experience, TFS works really well, even for small teams. If your total number of developers is five or less, you can use the relatively affordable Workgroup edition: above that, you'll have to pony up for the real thing, pricing for which is definitely in the 'Enterprise' realm...
The biggest hurdle to starting to use TFS is installing the darn thing: this process seems to be designed for maximum aggravation. (The extent to which the 'designers' of the 2005-to-2008 upgrade 'process' despise their users even manages to go beyond that: fortunately, you'll be able to start with TFS2008 and won't have to worry about upgrading for a while).
If you follow the instructions exactly, you should manage in 2-3 tries, though, and the hardware requirements aren't as bad as they seem. My 3-developer TFS setup runs quite comfortable on a previous-generation Dell laptop with 4GB of RAM.
One of the big advantages of TFS is the VS integration: this works just really, really well, and shelving and branching are implemented in a more straightforward way than with any other systems I've seen.
The process guidance and support in TFS are a bit less polished, but still quite usable. The pluggable support for several development methodologies is quite nice, and several third-party add-ons (for example for Scrum) are available already.
All in all, it definitely won't hurt to try TFS: if you have a MSDN subscription, you probably already have the Workgroup edition as well as a trial of the full version: otherwise, you can downloaded the latter from Microsoft as well.
UPDATE, April 12th, 2010: With the release of Team Foundation Server 2010, the installation and upgrade procedures have improved a lot. A new TFS2010 install shouldn't take you more than a few minutes (assuming you already have an instance of SQL Server 2008 up and running) and even an in-place upgrade of my TFS2008 setup proved to be entirely painless.
Setup of TFS is not too complicated, when you exactly follow the given guide step by step. We are using it on a small team for about one year now and i don't want to miss it any more.
Especially when you use more than one part of tfs like version control and work item tracking and maybe even teambuild, your team will benefit of the tight integration of the seperate parts.
For example, you can link to workitems when checking in code changes.
Then you run an automated build with teambuild and it will automatically update your workitems with the build number.
So afterwards you can see for example in a bug workitem the buildnumber which contains the bugfix.
We also use the sharepoint wiki for documentation and planning although i'm not the biggest sharepoint fan...
The main point is the great integration into the IDE and for workitem tracking the Teamsystem Web Access which allows you to control at least your workitems over a webinterface.
It's been awhile, but I'm thinking that it takes about a half-day to get setup, plus some time reading the manuals beforehand to make sure you know what you're doing. Configuration doesn't take too long -- you need to add all of your developers in as licensed users. Setting up projects is not too hard. I usually set up AD groups to map on the project roles and add those groups to the appropriate roles. I set up a new project in about 1/2 hour.
Note: I don't use any of the features of TFS except source control. If you plan to item tracking, use the project sharepoint site, etc., your mileage will vary quite a bit. I've found that on our projects (2-3 developers) a wiki works just as well for project management.
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While using Aptana and Eclipse for the first time in my programming life for PHP projects, I am wondering how these projects get funded. There is a lot of activity in the Eclipse community and the IDE itself is very good. I came across various Eclipse IDE sites and I am not able to decide which one is the official site of the Eclipse project. There is also news that the community is also working on dynamic language integration and one Aptana product is already out there.
How the full-time and part-time programmers get funded in these projects? I came to know that Aptana has withdrawn it's PHP support. Will Eclipse continue supporting PHP?
From the Eclipse "About" page:
The Eclipse Foundation is funded by
annual dues from our members and
governed by a Board of Directors.
Strategic Developers and Strategic
Consumers hold seats on this Board, as
do representatives elected by Add-in
Providers and Open Source committers.
The Foundation employs a full-time
professional staff to provide services
to the community but does not employ
the open source developers, called
committers, which actually work on the
Eclipse projects. Eclipse committers
are typically employed by
organizations or are independent
developers that volunteer their time
to work on an open source project.
Support for various languages in Eclipse is through Plugins. There are a number of plugins to provide PHP coding support.
Aptana on the other hand is a for profit company spun out of the Eclipse code base. I believe their current business model is selling hosting and support. They used to sell a "pro" edition of the editor, but I can't seem to find that anymore.
The homepage of the eclipse project is http://www.eclipse.org.
As to the funding: some programmers are paid (for example by IBM which originally started the eclipse project, or companies that use Eclipse as part of their own product or strategy), and as with almost all open-source projects a lot of programmers really just work in their free time on a part.
Eclipse consists of a rather small core, and a lot of plugins, which are all developed by different individuals.
Open source projects get funded because the companies and individuals involved believe that it is in their best interests. For some, it is a matter of building reputation so that they can sell services in other contexts. Some companies fund the Eclipse Foundation in exchange for goodwill, business opportunities, advertising, and whatnot.
Pragmatically, creating and running an open source project is a good way of bring like-minded individuals together to share a development burden. Much of what is created at Eclipse, for example, is infrastructure and frameworks upon which applications can be be built. If you think about it, most of the software we use contains tonnes of functionality that you only really care about if it isn't there. You probably don't use Eclipse because of the fantastic component model (OSGi referenced implementation), or the ability to stack views, manage editors, workbench, etc. However, if all those things weren't there, you probably wouldn't use Eclipse. In general, it's probably the case that upwards of 80% of the functionality in any given application just isn't all that interesting unless it's not there. Some 80% of functionality is "plumbing". So instead of having a dozen separate organizations each spend time and money building infrastructure/plumbing that the end user only cares about if it isn't there, these companies come together in open source to work together on those shared bits of infrastructure that they ultimately use to compete against each other in the marketplace. They do it in open source so as to invite additional like-minded organizations to participate.
Other organizations get involved with open source to help develop a market. If you think of all the millions of people who just use Eclipse. If some small number of them choose to buy a useful plug-in or two, that can turn into a good business.
Some organizations bet their business on the technology. Eclipse RCP, for example, is used by--literally--hundreds of organizations to deliver applications. If an organization depends so much on a technology, it makes sense to invest time, energy, and money in it to make sure that it continues to exist and grow.
Here's an article that I found interesting:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10387512-16.html?tag=mncol;title
There are other reasons, but these are some of my favourite.
Often projects like this are simply people with an interest giving their own time, sweat and tears to produce great software.
Some bigger ones (Mozilla Foundation) form non-profit organisations and may get donations. Mozilla gets millions of $s through their referral to Google in their search bar - every search from that to google counts for cash.
Very occasionally it's in a company's benefit to produce something open source and even pay their workers to work on it. Take Google Chrome for example. It makes sense for Google to make their browser, and indeed pay their employees for it. But to keep people trusting them, and to allow for other developers to play and add to it, they've released the source code in the Chromium project, and anyone can download, compile and use that.
In regards to Aptana - that's a company, and they write open source free plugins to Eclipse etc so that people can write for and use their products. It makes sense for them to contribute as they'll get something back. I can't see any reference to them pulling their support though, but you may well have better sources.
Hope that helps!
They outsource everything to offshore cubicles.