Engineering Excellence

All Camunda blog posts tagged with Engineering Excellence.

Jun 11, 2015

Why we Re-Implemented BPMN Multi-Instance Support in 7.3

Have you ever experienced bugs with multi-instance activities? You may choose from any of these: CAM-986, CAM-1731, CAM-2075, CAM-2338, CAM-2787, CAM-2897, CAM-3851, CAM-3925. From the engine’s early beginnings, its multi-instance implementation was more of a quick hack than a durable solution. Yet, it was carried from release to release, the pile of bugs and hair lost by desperate developers growing steadily. With Camunda BPM 7.3, we have refactored multi-instance fundamentally, drying one of the largest bug sources and fighting developer bald-headedness. This post provides insight into the engine’s execution model, two alternatives of treating multi-instance in that model, and why we believe our recent changes have dramatically improved the situation. On Process Execution In order to understand the implementation of…

By Thorben Lindhauer

Engineering Excellence

Jun 2, 2015

Build your own Camunda task explorer with CDI and JSF

There’s a lot of interest in how to write a task list with CDI and JSF, and not a lot of up-to-date examples available. Until now! – In this blog post I’m going to show you how you can build your own task list with Camunda BPM Build a process application with JSF and CDI To get tasks into your task list, you need to build a process application that includes at least one process definition, as well as some user tasks. A recipe to build a JSF based process application can be found in our getting started guide. After completing the tutorial you’ll have a pizza order process like this: It contains a simple start form to start process instances and…

By Ingo Richtsmeier

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

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

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

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 17, 2015

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 Excellence

Feb 9, 2015

{ 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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