Author

Daniel Meyer

Engineering Excellence

Jun 15, 2015

Would you use Apache Cassandra for Camunda persistence?

I am currently planning a hack session with people who are interested in using Apache Cassandra as database for Camunda Process engine. Their main motivation for supporting us is that their whole application is running on Apache Cassandra and they want to use Cassandra as persistence provider for their workflows as well. They have extensive experience with Cassandra and want to contribute their work as open source. If the hacksession which will take place at the beginning of July is successful, we would setup a public repository on GitHub were the community could collaborate around this. I have blogged about our friends at Zalando doing work in that direction as well. Would more people be interested in being able to…

By Daniel Meyer

Engineering Excellence

May 29, 2015

Camunda BPM 7.3.0 Final Released

I’m pleased to announce the availability of Camunda 7.3.0 Final. The release focuses on improving Camunda BPM for large production deployments. The highlights are: Process instance repair and modification: go back or skip ahead in a process. Authorizations: restrict access to processes, tasks and administrative actions. Search for process instances and incidents in Cockpit Starting new process instance at any activity / set of activities Tasklist extensibility and customization: extend the Tasklist Web Application with Html and Javascript based plugins. A detailed feature overview can be found at the end of this the post. Download For Free Run with Docker Register for the Webinar Process Instance Repair and Modification Sometimes process instances somehow take a wrong turn or end up…

By Daniel Meyer

Engineering Excellence

Apr 24, 2015

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 Excellence

Mar 17, 2015

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

Mar 11, 2015

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 Excellence

Mar 5, 2015

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 Excellence

Feb 5, 2015

Data mapping and transformation with Camunda Spin and Java 8

Working with text based data formats such as Xml and JSON is a common requirement when implementing BPMN processes.    Since version 7.2 Camunda provides an optional library which is called Camunda Spin. Spin is a lightweight wrapper library which provides a easy to use API when working with text based data formats such as XML and JSON.   In this post I show how the Camunda Spin can be used for implementing data transformations and mapping in combination with the Java 8 Stream processing API and contrast this to the classical Java 6 / 7 way of doing it.    Example The example we use is how to transform a list of The Big Bang Theory episodes (provided as…

By Daniel Meyer

Engineering Excellence

Feb 2, 2015

Gracefully Cancelling a Process Instance

Cancelling a running process instance in Camunda is easy:   DELETE /process-instance/{id} or, using Java API: RuntimeService.deleteProcessInstance(String, String) this will simply delete the process instance and remove it from the database. Sometimes this is exactly what you need. However: what if you want to cancel the process instance gracefully? Gracefully in the sense that the effects it has had on the outside world are undone? The answer to this is compensation. In this post I discuss two ways to implement compensation. Internal Compensation Modeling compensation inside the process itself: The compensation undoes the effects of the process so far. This is usually modeled in a way where you attach a compensation handler to those service tasks which have effects on…

By Daniel Meyer

Engineering Excellence

Jan 27, 2015

Camunda BPM 7.3.0-alpha1 released

The first alpha release in the 7.3 branch is ready! This is what’s inside: New Documentation Case Management Getting Started Tutorial (Docs) Multi Tenancy (Docs) Process Engine Features Namespaces in XPath (CAM-2342) Typed Variable API in CDI Module (CAM-3152, contribution by Michael Scholz) Support for CMMN Manual Activation Rule (CAM-3169) Use BPMN Call Activity for starting a CMMN Case Instance (CAM-3353) Bugfixes Multi Instance (CAM-986, contribution by Ronny Bräunlich) Variable Serialization (CAM-3167, CAM-3174, CAM-3176, CAM-3179) Cockpit Maintenance Upgrade to Bootstrap 3 (See “Known Issues” below) Switched from Angular UI to Angular Bootstrap (See “Known Issues” below) Support for requirejs-angular-define deprecated Features Improved startup time: All Javascript resources are now minified (including plugins) Advanced Process Instance Search (CAM-2697, enterprise edition only) Camunda Tasklist Features Create a standalone…

By Daniel Meyer

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