The second customer speaker at camunda’s community day was Peter Hachenberger from 1&1 Internet, describing how they use Signavio and camunda BPM to create their Process Platform, which is in turn used by their clients’ developers for building and executing automated processes. His presentation was primarily about the details of their technical implementation of the platform; they have built some fairly comprehensive tools for monitoring and managing executing processes, many of which are facilitated by changes that they made to the core process engine, including retry behavior, process ID generator, multiple business keys, an asynchronous process starter API, an extended REST API and a few new commands. Since camunda BPM is open source, any customer such as 1&1 can take a copy of the code and make changes to it, optionally returning them to the community if they are valuable to others. There’s a bit of danger in this, in that if you make changes to core functionality (such as the engine) rather than create an extension or plug-in, and those changes do not end up back in the community version, you’re not only on your own for future development on those components but may not be able to upgrade to future versions.
We had a number of short (10 minute) presentations from community members to discuss extensions that they are working on:
- Grails plugin to add camunda functionality to Grails applications
- OSGi module extension for greater flexibility and configurability at runtime, including sharing process engines as services
- Elasticsearch extension to write camunda BPM history data to an elasticsearch cluster to allow full-text searching, enabling more comprehensive analytics
- camunda mocking extensions for process testing with mockito
- Cockpit plugin to add interactive graphs and some statistical calculations (e.g., aggregation, regression, min/max) for process monitoring directly on the camunda history database
Some of these extension projects were done by camunda employees, but great to see the external community contributions as well.
1. How does 1&1 reconcile the changes made by developers? Or is it a constant recycle back to signavio?
2. Which of these plug-ins specifically are written by external community? And are those also OS?
Hi Vishal.
1&1 compltly generates the executable models from their Signavio model – so there is no cycle necessary. If they change anything (even technical issues) it will be changed in Signavio. Itr is working because it is really easy to extract the model from Signavio in their environment leveraging own maven plugins.
The Plugins are normally OSS and can be found in our GitHub ecosystem. Best search for it (e.g. google for camunda + mockito will point you to the right place).
Cheers
Bernd