Engineering Excellence

All Camunda blog posts tagged with Engineering Excellence.

Sep 11, 2015

Scaling Camunda BPM in a Cluster: Job Executors and Coordination

Throughout development of Camunda 7.4, one of our focus points is job executor features and improvements. The job executor is the process engine’s component to perform deferred actions, such as executing an intermediate timer event or an asynchronous continuation. Thus it is central in the Camunda architecture and central for scaling the BPM platform in a cluster. In this post we provide insight in job executor behavior and how job executor instances be coordinated by employing a backoff strategy that is part of the upcoming Camunda 7.4.0-alpha2 release. Setting: Clustered Job Execution As pointed out in the previous post on our new job prioritization feature, Camunda is widely used by customers in domains where the degree of automation is…

By Thorben Lindhauer

Engineering Excellence

Sep 1, 2015

BPMN Quest – Camunda as a Game Engine!

This year at the annual Camunda hackdays one team bravely took it upon themselves to balance out the innovative and useful projects with something fun and frivolous. For two days somewhere in Brandenburg we were “Awesome-Team-Awesome” and we turned the Camunda engine into a platform to create a D&D style quest game. We call it BPMN Quest. The project was split into a few different features and handed out to the reverently skilled members of the (awesome) team (awesome). Location Map – showing the current location of the character as they moved through the story was given over to Paddy with help from Neville. Player’s Quest Page – the interface that the user playing the game would see, including story…

By Niall Deehan

Engineering Excellence

Sep 1, 2015

Context Help in Camunda using SOLR Search Server

Last week we had our annual hack days – that means 48 hours of producing something awesome. Together with Falko, Ingo and Thorben we build a context help within the Camunda BPM Workbench prototype. This uses Apache SOLR to index various sources (we did the user forum, the docs on GitHub, a Community Extension and internal best practices). We discussed details on this index and did a comparison to ElasticSearch. It was a great study for options and use cases of such a help in our tool chain – but watch the result yourself: Context Help / Search via SOLR – hooken into Camunda BPM Workbench from Camunda on Vimeo. Note that this is a prototype – sources are on…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering Excellence

Aug 31, 2015

Process Test Coverage Report

As part of the Hack Days this year my colleague Falko migrated an existing tool we (Camunda Consulting) used with success in a lot of projects to bpmn.io: The Process Test Coverage Report Generator. It just hooks into an automated test (typically JUnit) and creates an HTML report showing the coverage: For every Test Case For the whole Test Suite See this example for one test case – obviously the Happy Path of the process model: The report can easily be watched locally within your IDE or hooked into your Jenkins Build. See GitHub Readme for details. By the way – our Best Practice is to go for “Flow Node Coverage” – so your Test Suite should “visit” each BPMN Flow…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering Excellence

Aug 19, 2015

How to repeat a task in CMMN?

We have some good news: We implemented the repetition rule in our CMMN engine. This gives the users the ability to repeat a task under certain conditions. We invite you to try it out! For testing purposes use the current 7.4.0-SNAPSHOT of the engine and repeat a CMMN task as often as you wish. There also exists some documentation with an explanation how the repetition rule works and how you can use it. Just read the section about repetition rule. Every feedback is welcome. If you miss something or something does not work as expected please let us know. PS: We are currently refactoring the documentation. So apologize if there is something in the documentation that does not work as usually….

By Roman Smirnov

Engineering Excellence

Aug 10, 2015

Bringing Together: Transactions, Cancel Events and Compensation Tasks

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to enjoy Camunda’s BPMN training then you probably have fond memories of the slide featuring Compensation tasks and Cancel events. It happens to be the very last slide in the symbol set section and is traditionally follows by a well deserved break. It also happens to be a very well implemented part of the Camunda engine. This post is going to be all about how a process containing a transaction, cancel end event and compensation task are all implemented. The process I’m going to be describing is available on GitHub to download and play with yourself. the process itself looks like this: This process describes booking a holiday, as this is an example…

By Niall Deehan

Engineering Excellence

Aug 10, 2015

Migrate Process Versions

My colleague Ingo just finished a new cockpit plugin allowing to easily migrate a running process instance to a new version of the process definition: You can find the sources of the plugin on GitHub: https://github.com/camunda/camunda-cockpit-plugins/tree/master/cockpit-plugin-version-migration If you want to build some migration scrips (as customers often do) you can easily cherry-pick some code from the plugin to apply it yourself, see ProcessInstanceMigrationResource.java for the core functionality). By doing so you can e.g. migrate a bunch of instances in one go – and adjust some variables on the way (as new versions might require new data). Please note that version migration has limitations and risks – we collected them in the README. We used an unsupported internal Command. The whole…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering Excellence

Aug 5, 2015

Start and complete a process with the REST API

Please note that this post is getting older and parts are out of date. If you’re looking to use our REST API, you can find updated versions here: Camunda Platform 8: Start a Camunda Platform 8 Process via REST with Webhooks Camunda Platform 7: Start and Step Through a Process with REST (feat. SwaggerUI) If you’ve already downloaded the Camunda BPM platform you’ve already got our invoice example running locally. So I’m going to start with how you might run through that process using our REST API. I’m going to assume that you’ve got some method of making those calls either programmatically or using a RestClient (I’ve used chrome’s advanced rest client to test the calls). So lets begin… Starting…

By Niall Deehan

Engineering Excellence

Aug 3, 2015

Job Prioritization for Asynchronous Processing at Scale

Camunda users process heavy workloads with the process engine. Often this includes asynchronous processing which is handled using the job executor component. The amount of jobs that need to be processed can quickly reach an order of magnitude of millions of jobs per day. To bring order into situations of high job executor load, Camunda BPM 7.4.0 will ship job prioritization. With our first 7.4.0-alpha1 release, you can already have a look at it and give it a try. This article deals with three questions: What is Job Prioritization useful for? How to use Job Prioritization? What will this look like in 7.4.0? The Case for Job Prioritization Up to date, Camunda BPM is used by a growing number of…

By Thorben Lindhauer

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