I am working on designing a workflow with the intention of using cadence workflow engine and Java client. Seems like uber is actively using Go, and thus Go has better documentation and Activity and other classes than Java Client. Is this true?
No, it is not really true. The majority of the open source users of Cadence and Temporal are using Java SDK.
If you go the the java-client channel in Cadence slack, the community has more discussion than go-client. Even in Uber, Java-client is heavily used by core services like payments.
Go client happens to have more docs/samples because it started a little earlier. In fact, the docs that are missing in Java, could be derived from Go. It should be noted that there are more documents in Java library. For example, the documents of how to write unit tests, instead of putting in to cadenceworkflow.io, we put in
javadocs directly. Because this is the convention for Java developer to lookup documentation.
IMO they are the same important for Cadence. All the new features are implemented/rolling out at the same time hence they don't have real difference.
We are currently doing some research about CQRS and Event Sourcing and found two major frameworks taking care of these two concerns: Axon Framework and Eventuate. Both are continuesly developed, while Eventuate is now more actively developed in the RBMH repository.
I was GIT cloning some sample projects for both and came to the conlusion that Eventuate looks a little bit more lightweight, however I assume this is due to lack of features compared to Axon.
I tried in vain to find a comparison between those 2 frameworks, also here in Stackoverflow I couldn't find any. Does someone have some input?
Being the original author of Axon Framework, this answer may be a bit biased. I am also not an expert in Eventuate, although I am familiar with its concepts.
Axon has been around for about 7 years and is being used by many systems in production since then. It appears that Eventuate has been designed as a SaaS solution (with open source local-install alternative), which is currently in Alpha.
Both frameworks seem to have been designed with different goals in mind. Where Eventuate focuses on Event Sourcing and event publication, Axon's focus is much more on the abstraction of messaging, where messaging is both Commands, Events and (in a later stage also) Queries. It provides annotations to demarcate Event and Command handlers. It also allows you to design your entities in a way that keeps it decoupled from the framework's internals.
This abstraction allows you to "plug in" any database you would like to use as Event Store. Axon provides support for JPA, JDBC and MongoDB out of the box. As far as I can tell, Eventuate provides its own event store implementation.
Does anyone know which latest scala version SORM supports? Also is the development of SORM ongoing? Finally, Are there any plans to support noSQL databases or as the name implies, is it only for relational databases?
SORM supports the whole 2.10.* Scala branch.
Development is ongoing but isn't very fast. With the release of version 0.4 SORM will be hugely refactored and modularized towards much easier third-party driver development. I expect this to draw in a more substantial contribution to the project.
SORM's APIs are getting changed to get free from chains of relational drivers and to generalize with future NoSQL drivers implementations in mind. Though I must admit that no specific implementations of NoSQL drivers are planned for the 0.4.0 release, but it's planned to work on a CouchDB support after this release.
Yeah, with these plans the framework's title seems to become quite confusing, but it's the issue with the least priority right now.
I'm doing a comparison among all existing BPMN 2.0 Process Engines e.g. Activiti, jBPM etc.
I've prepared a list of 4 process engines which executes BPMN 2.0 given below;
Popular BPMN 2.0 compliant open-source engines:
Activiti: http://www.activiti.org/
jBPM: http://www.jboss.org/jbpm
Bonita: http://www.bonitasoft.com/
A commercial engine:
ActiveVOS: http://www.activevos.com/products
I would appreciate your help if you enhance my research by adding any existing Process Engines (for BPMN 2.0) in the above list along with the quick comparison among all.
I would prefer a very short comparison listing only important features (distinguishing features like what is possible for one and not for others, licensing, dependencies with other products like tomcat & JBoss and operating systems etc)
P.S: I've found much on Activiti vs jBPM but still your answers will be a favor.
I cannot offer you a full-fledged comparison but I can give you some pointers that might help you in your evaluation:
An "Activiti in Action" book has just been published (July
2012) and in it you will have a section reviewing other BPMN process
engines (Section 1.2.3 - Knowing the competitors).
For Activiti, there also exists since recently, a commercially-supported version called camunda fox BPM Platform. They also provide a comparison with the added-value they provide here.
I am disappointed with Activiti. It should be called Spring BPM because it doesn't work well without it. If you don't mind using Spring, then Activiti might be a better fit. If you are using JEE/CDI, then JBPM is a better fit.
I did such a research, too. Here are the key-points which were relevant for our concrete use case:
Bonita:
Bonita has a zero-coding approach which means that they provide an easy to use IDE to build your processes without the need for coding. To achieve that, Bonita has the concept of connectors. For example, if you want to consume a web service, they provide you with a graphical wizzard. The downside is that you have to write the plain XML SOAP-envelope manually and copy it in a graphical textbox. The problem with this approach is that you only can realize use cases which are intended by Bonita. If you want to integrate a system which Bonita did not developed a connector for, you have to code such a connector on your own which is very painful. For example, Bonita offers a SOAP connector for consuming SOAP web services. This connector only works with SOAP 1.2, but not for SOAP 1.1 (http://community.bonitasoft.com/answers/consume-soap-11-webservices-bonita-secure-web-service-connector). If you have a legacy application with SOAP 1.1, you cannot integrate this system easily in your process. The same is true for databases. There are only a few database connectors for dedicated database versions. If you have a version not matching to a connector, you have to code this on your own.
In addition, Bonita has no support for LDAP or Active Directory Sync in the free community edition which is quite a showstopper for a production environment. Another thing to consider is that Bonita is licensed under the GPL / LGPL license which could cause problems when you want to integrate Bonita in another enterprise application. In addition, the community support is very weak. There are several posts which are more than 2 years old and those posts are still not answered.
Another important thing is Business-IT-Alignment. Modelling processes is a collaborative discipline in which IT AND the business analysts are involed. That is why you need adequate tools for both user groups (e.g. an Eclipse Plugin for the developers and an easy to use web modeler for the business people). Bonita only offers Bonita Studio, which needs to be installed on your machine. This IDE is quite technical and not suitable for business users. Therefore, it is very hard to realize Business-IT-Alignment with Bonita.
Bonita is a BPM tool for very trivial and easy processes. Because of the zero-coding approach, the lerning curve is very low and you can start modelling very fast. You need less programming skills and you are able to realize your processes without the need of coding. But as soon as your processes become very complex, Bonita might not be the best solution because of the lack of flexibility. You only can realize use cases which are intended by Bonita.
jBPM:
jBPM is a very powerful Open Source BPM Engine which has a lot of features. The web modeler even supports prefabricated models of some van der Aalst workflow patterns (workflowpatterns.com). Business-IT-Alignment is realizable because jBPM offers an Eclipse integration as well as a web-based modeler. A bit tricky is that you only can define forms in the web modeler, but not in the Eclipse Plugin, as far as I know. To sum up, jBPM is a good candidate for using in a company. Our showstopper was the scalability. jBPM is based on the Rules-Engine Drools. This leads to the fact that whole process instances are persisted as BLOBS in the database. This is a critial showstopper when you consider searching and scalability.
In addition, the learning curve is very high because of the complexity. jBPM does not offer a Service Task like the BPMN-Standard suggests In contrast, you have to define your own Java Service tasks and you have to register them manually in the engine, which results in quite low level programming.
Activiti:
In the end, we went with Activiti because this is a very easy to use framework-based engine. It offers an Eclipse Plugin as well as a modern AngularJS Web-Modeler. In this way, you can realize Business-IT-Alignment. The REST-API is secured by Spring Security which means that you can extend the Engine very easily with Single Sign-on features. Because of the Apache License 2.0, there is no copyleft which means you are completely free in terms of usage and extensibility which is very important in a productive environment.
In addition, the BPMN-coverage is very good. Not all BPMN-elements are realized, but I do not know any engine which does that.
The Activiti Explorer is a demo frontend which demonstrates the usage of the Activiti APIs. Since this frontend is based on VAADIN, it can be extended very easily. The community is very active which means that you can get help very fast if you have any problems.
Activiti offers good integration points for external form-technologies which is very important for a productive usage. The form-technologies of all candidates are very restrictive. Therefore, it makes sense to use a standard form-technology like XForms in combination with the Engine. Even such more complex things are realizable via the formKey-Attribute.
Activiti does not follow the zero-coding approach which means that you will need a bit of coding if you want to orchestrate services. But even the communication with SOAP services can be achieved by using a Java Service Task and Apache CXF. The coding effort is low.
I hope that my key points can help by taking a decision. To be clear, this is no advertisment for Activiti. The right product choice depends on the concrete use cases. I only want to point out the most important points in our project.
Best regards Ben
Nommy, you should take a look at Roubroo - a process engine built to natively support BPMN 2.0. It does not have the legacy of an older process engine being retrofitted to support the new standard. It support BPMN 2.0 execution semantics including the IOR gateway, which I think is the key to way business processes are defined in a networked graph. jBPM and Activiti are based on the underlying PVM, which has great support for some workflow patterns but not for others. Take a look at this research paper : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/14320/1/14320.pdf
and http://www.workflowpatterns.com/evaluations/opensource/
In my opinion currently Camunda BPM Platform the leader in the open source field.
And you mentioned Open Source?
So try camunda if you like:
- Clean BPMN focused engine (Shared, Embedable or "remote")
- Clean and working REST API
- Out of the box Platform with basic administration tools, and development ready API's
- Biggest open-source community (my persnoal oppinion)
- Best of Breed approach in the java eco-system.
- If you like Java.
- If you want to that your Processes get accepted by your IT crowd.
http://www.camunda.com/fox/product/details/
jBPM5 is agnostic to the environment, it doesn't depend on JBoss, you can run it in every Application Server, Servlet Container or a SE environment. jBPM5 is licensed with the Apache Software License V2 which I believe that is a really good idea.
You can of course find more information in the official page.
Cheers
Regarding jBPM:
jBPM is an open-source workflow engine written in Java that can execute business processes described in BPMN 2.0 (or its own process definition language jPDL in earlier versions). It is released under the ASL (or LGPL in earlier versions) by the JBoss company
It includes,
Strong and powerful integration with business rules and event processing.
Process collaboration, monitoring and management through the Guvnor repository and the management consoles.
Human interaction using an independent WS-HT human task service.
In essence jBPM takes graphical process descriptions as input. A process is composed of tasks that are connected with sequence flows. Processes represent an execution flow. The graphical diagram (flow chart) of a process is used as the basis for the communication between non-technical users and developers.
Take also a look at Imixs-Workflow which is a human-centric workflow engine. Unlike the usual engines, Imixs workflow is characterised by strong support for user-centric.
Human-centric business process management means supporting human skills, activities and collaboration in a task-oriented manner. With such a Workflow engine you can protect and securely distribute business data within an event-driven BPM architecture based on the BPMN 2.0 standard.
The Imixs-Workflow engine is open source and can be integrated in Jakarta EE oder deployed out of the box with a Microservice running in a Docker container
Take a look at Zeebe.io - a modern, cloud-native workflow engine with first-class Node.js support.
We had a rather nice lecture about Model driven architecture by a guy from Model Labs.
One thing that got me intrigued was the version control for models ( not to be confused with different models of version control) - or the lack of thereof. By version control for models he meant a way to version XML, EMF files which preserves their semantic.
So, I'm interested in what has been done so far on that field (he mentioned something about SVN and Moodle, though I could have misheard him). The Google search yielded nothing so I'm turning to the wisdom of the Stack Overflow.
I'm looking mostly for information in the form of books, articles, links.
I don't know of a VCS alone dedicated to Model, because Model-base design is often part of a all chain of documents that need to be kept in sync.
Namely (not an exhaustive list):
requirements documents (from which you start modeling)
source code and documentations (generated and implemented from the model)
Plus, I never saw the GUI aspect fully solved in those tools (one model painstakingly organized a certain way might be versioned without layout information, and restored organized another way).
One tool I know of which covers all of those development processes is Modelio, which includes a "teamwork manager"
Another example (which I don't know as much about) would be metaCASE, which has an interesting paper "The Model Repository: More than just XML under version control", about DSM (Domain-Specific Modeling).
DSM: model-based software development approach that uses visual models as primary artifacts in the development process.
DSM raises the level of abstraction beyond normal programming languages by directly specifying the solution in a language that uses concepts and rules from the problem domain – a Domain-Specific Language (DSL).
It does summarize the problem:
There is increased awareness within the modeling arena of the need for
a central repository of system description information.
This is brought on by a growing recognition that only with a strong central repository can modeling tools be integrated, cope with large projects, provide full life-cycle support, produce complete documentation, perform system-wide validation and verification, and adequately control a project.
A full list of version control tools for models can be found here: http://modeling-languages.com/content/version-control-tools-modeling-artifacts
Check EMF framework Edapt
it provides the following features:
Edapt IDE Tooling:
Ecore Editor enhancement to create and maintain the history of an Ecore
Operation-browser to execute refactorings on an Ecore
Release Tooling to prepare a migration plugin from the Ecore history
Custom Migration Support
Edapt Runtime:
API to detect version of given model instances
API to migrate model instances with registered migration plugins