Author

Bernd Ruecker

Aug 6, 2015

Rendering BPMN and highlight current task using bpmn.io

With bpmn.io and the Camunda REST API it is really simple to develop a small HTML page that displays a process instance graphically and highlights some activities. In our “JSF Simple Tasklist” snippet we used this to highlight the current Task (like it is done in the Camunda BPM Tasklist): The cool thing – you do not need a lot of code to do this! This is what we do: Handed over the taskId via URL parameter (see Screenshot). Load the Task details and BPMN XML via REST API. Instantiate the BPMN viewer and hand over the XML for rendering Add a CSS class for the activity to be highlighted Load JavaScript/CSS dependencies, we used WebJars, so they are…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering Excellence

May 7, 2015

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

May 6, 2015

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 Excellence

Aug 15, 2014

cockpit plugin store

We have Camunda Cockpit as a great tool for monitoring and operations. But roles and requirements for monitoring and operations always differ in our real-life projects – so we allow plugins for Cockpit. In the last 48 hours (on our Camunda hackdays) we implemented a “plugin store” for the existing community plugins – so everybody can much easier try out plugins or see what plugins exist. The plugin store scans various GitHub repositories and searches for plugin metadata. And we compiled a list of all default plugins included in the standard distribution (as most of the cockpit functionality is implemented as plugin). You can browse through all plugins easily: Try it out: https://camunda.org/plugins/ After collecting plugins you can: download the cockpit.war: In…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering Excellence

Feb 28, 2014

How to use camunda-bpmn.js to visualize custom business data in process models

As part of camunda BPM we ship camunda-bpmn.js – a JavaScript framework to visualize BPMN 2.0 process models directly in your browser. It allows you to easily add own information to it. Daniel Klotz from our long-lasting customer Count+Care now leveraged that to show additional information on a process diagram to users (within their own application). He wrote a great tutorial and open sourced the code as an example on GitHub: https://github.com/zerounix/camunda.process.diagram. Great stuff – thanks a lot Daniel! And expect even more power with bpmn.io later this year 🙂 Happy coding…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering Excellence

Dec 11, 2013

Get your own camunda BPM T-Shirt!

Still need a Christmas present? How about a cool camunda BPM T-Shirt? Various team members designed the Shirts themselves and we got quite some response throughout the year. So we will make them available to you! OK – to be honest we will not make it before Christmas – but you can look forward to your new Shirt early in 2014! T-Shirts cost 20 € each (including shipping within Germany – ask us for international shipment options if applicable). We collect orders from now on till 31st of December, order the bunch of T-Shirts and ship them in January to you. How does that sound? If you are interested please send an email to t-shirt@camunda.com with exact amount, style, color, size…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering Excellence

Nov 29, 2013

Monitor collaborating executable BPMN 2.0 processes in cockpit

In a current customer project we faced the issue that there were two executable processes – independent of each other. So far – so normal. But these two processes had to sync status here and there – so they were clearly related, but not by using a Call Activity. BPMN 2.0 allows this by communication via messages as shown in the following example. But how to keep track of this in monitoring? We developed a small cockpit plugin to show the related process instances – see below. The process is in the area of IT infrastructure management, where changes are handled by multiple different change processes handled by different departments which are pretty autonomous. But actually for today’s post it is not…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering Excellence

Nov 18, 2013

Create a camunda BPM Process Application using Maven Archetype in 1 minute

For quite some time we already use Maven Archetypes in our camunda BPM training and at customer projects to create camunda BPM Process Applications – which are normally simple Maven projects.I created a 30 seconds survey to get feedback on archetypes. We currently have two archetypes available: war: Use on Servlet containers like Tomcat. ejb: Use on EJB containers like JBoss AS, WebSphere, Glassfish or WebLogic. You can find the full documentation online: Maven Archetypes (Project Templates).So you can start using it today. Give us feedback! We currently discuss how important archetypes are for our community and what types of archetypes we should provide (if any). Please take 30 seconds to fill in our survey. Thank you!

By Bernd Ruecker

Community

Oct 23, 2013

What a wonderful community day in Prague

Last Friday we had our first camunda BPM community day! It was really awesome! Thanks everybody who joined. I am really impressed that we could organize that so close after the 7.0 release and so many people already traveled to Prague just for us. I can just repeat myself: AWESOME! Today I want to share some impressions and slides with you – we recorded the sessions and hope we will get videos online soon as well. Introduction & Vision After welcoming everybody Daniel talked about camunda BPM and the technical vision, which is about to empower developers to build awesome BPM applications. He briefly discussed the improved performance in 7.0 and I saw a lot of people nodding when Daniel…

By Bernd Ruecker

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