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Engineering

Long running processes and service authentication – SAML tokens to the rescue?

When executing long running business processes which include service invocations you often have to solve a problem: What credentials should you use when calling the service? Let’s have a look at a simple example: A user might start the process manually. Then service 1 might be executed with the credentials of this user. But how about service 2? Should it be executed with credentials from the first user or the user who finished the user task? How about service 3? From our experience, there is no rule of thumb but it needs to be decided based on the project requirements. All of the three options are valid: The starting user credentials will be used for all service calls in…

By Bernd Ruecker

Community

Camunda + Liferay Community Meeting

Yesterday evening we met at our Partner Ancud IT in Nuremberg (Germany). Ancud presented their experiences using Portals (namely the Open Source Portal Liferay) in combination with Process Engines (namely Camunda :-)). That was already a topic in a recent webinar, you can check out the recording online: English or German. Afterwards we had interesting discussions about DMN use cases and a “social collaboration hub” research project. But let’s start from the beginning. Camunda + Liferay A process application needs a user interface. According to Ancud experiences this is most often a portal – or at least some home grown portal like thing. Personally I am not yet convinced as we still do a lot of non-portal projects – but…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering

Camunda BPM 7.3.0-alpha3 released

A new alpha release of our open source BPM and Workflow platform is available for download. The highlights of this release are: Process Engine Java and REST API Process-level authorizations: define ACL-like authorizations for restricting possible interactions with process-related resources (Process Definitions, Process Instances, Tasks …), in both Java and REST API. Deep tissue refactoring of implementation of Multi Instance constructs in process engine. Many, many bug fixes related to multi instance, event sub processes, boundary events and compensation. API for process instance repair: Modify a process instance’s execution structure through the ability to start and cancel activities in a flexible way. Job Executor Threadpool can be configured for shared process engine in Apache Tomcat Improved Error Handling: call activities…

By Daniel Meyer

Engineering

New Camunda Workbench Release – Adds Stepping in Debugger

After a one day hack session, Nico and myself are proud to release a new version of Camunda Workbench. The Highlights of this Release are: Upgrade bpmn.io to v0.9.0 Create a new process Debugger now has stepping support Breakpoints after activities Display the type of variables Enhanced Script Editing What is Camunda Workbench? Camunda Workbench is the next big thing in browser-based tooling for BPMN based process automation 🙂 But most and foremost: Workbench is AWESOME! It brings use cases around modeling and execution of processes close together. In workbench you can model a process, deploy it to Camunda BPM Process Engine and then debug it in an interactive way. See for yourself: Camunda Workbench – Create and debug a…

By Daniel Meyer

Community

Camunda meets Cassandra @Zalando: Community Meeting Write-up

Jorn Horstman, André Hartmann and Lukas Niemeier from Zalando Tech visited us yesterday evening to present their prototype for running Camunda engine on Apache Cassandra. They published their slides. Zalando is a “multinational e-commerce company that specializes in selling shoes, clothing and other fashion and lifestyle products online“. 2014 they had a revenue of €2.3 billion and currently have 8,500 employees (Source: Wikipedia). AND: they are Camunda enterprise edition subscribers and use Camunda process engine for processing their orders. Whenever you buy something in their online shop, a process instance is kicked off in Camunda process engine. Zalando’s current Architecture Zalando’s system needs to scale horizontally. Currently Zalando’s order processing runs on PostgreSQL database. They partition their order and process engine…

By Daniel Meyer

Engineering

Camunda BPM 7.3.0-alpha2 released

A new alpha release of our open source BPM and Workflow platform is available for download. The highlights of this release are: Process Engine and Rest API Native JSON and XML Variable Value Types Improved Sorting: specify multiple sort parameters in Rest API, sort task by variable value Historic Job Log Support for databases: Oracle 12c Partially Order Historic Activity Instances by occurrence Cockpit UI improvements Advanced Process Instance Search (enterprise feature) Tasklist Sort by multiple parameters Sort by variable value Admin Browse Users by Group JavaScript SDK Add group resource Support local variables The full release notes can retrieved from Jira. The known issues as well. You can download Camunda, run it with Docker or add it to your…

By Daniel Meyer

Engineering

Feedback wanted: Camunda BPM and Business Rules

Have you ever used the business rules task in BPMN? Are your company’s business rules closely related to your processes? Many of our users will answer these questions with a ‘yes’. With the new DMN standard for decision management and business rules being close to the final release at OMG, the whole topic has recently been getting increased attention. The DMN (Decision Model and Notation) standard has been built in a way so that it can easily interact and integrate with BPMN. Camunda BPM is widely considered a great BPMN engine. We have recently added the CMMN standard for case management to this engine, which was a great success for our users. Now we are thinking about adding a solution…

By Robert Gimbel

Engineering

{ json : everywhere } – How to use JSON in a process

Since Camunda BPM platform 7.2 it is very easy to read, write and manipulate JSON objects by using Camunda Spin. Among other things, this feature is used to serialize Java objects inside a process instance in the process engine. But what if you want to use JSON Variables without mapping to Java objects? With the next alpha release we will introduce a new ValueType “json” (and “xml” but that is an other story). In this post I demonstrate how you can use the JSON value type to implement HTML Forms which work with a JSON Variable, implement BPMN Sequence Flow conditions based on the properties of the JSON Variable. Example Process In this post I use the following example process:…

By Roman Smirnov

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