Tag: bpmcon14

What’s Next In camunda – Wrapping Up Community Day

We finished the camunda community day with an update from camunda on features coming in 7.2 next month, and the future roadmap. camunda releases the community edition in advance of the commercial edition; this is the way that open source should work, but some commercial open source vendors switch that around so that the community version lags by as much as a full version.

The highlights of the 7.2 release are as follows:

  • CMMN-based case management engine, which includes the core activities (stages, human tasks, process tasks, case tasks, milestones and sentries), the base case instance and plan item lifecycle, and a CMMN model API and REST API on a common process engine. They demonstrated a basic case manager UI that can manage cases and the related tasks; I assume that this is really just a demo of what can be done rather than intended as production code. They also don’t have case modeling in their modeler yet, so it’s early times.
  • A variety of functions for speeding development: connectors (currently REST and SOAP), dataformats, templating and scripting (calling external scripts, currently Groovy or Javascript but with others to come)
  • New tasklist, updating the tasklist UI that they released just before announcing camunda as an open source project. It allows filters to be defined, including specifying who can see the results of a filter in addition to the search criteria; that filter then appears as a tab on the task list, in the color defined by the filter author. The sort order can’t currently be defined as part of the filter, but can be set on the general tasklist interface. This adds a third (left) column to the tasklist UI, which also shows the list of tasks and the form for the selected task. Still work to be done, but the new filters capability is a big step up, providing a conceptually similar (but much different graphically) functionality to the Brazos portal filters.

There were a list of other smaller enhancements and fixes, from platform support to performance improvements to new functions.

We also saw some work in progress from the labs. First of all, an update on bpmn.io, which I saw at bpmNEXT earlier this year: a BPMN viewer and web modeler.. The viewer allows embedding of a BPMN diagram into a web page, including adding annotations, overlays and markers on the diagram, via a Javascript API. Check out a live demo here, demonstrating a BPMN diff function based on two similar process diagrams. From the viewer, you can export the model to a file. You can also create BPMN diagrams from scratch or import from a file, either directly on their site or embedded in another page. The modeler is still bit basic, and doesn’t handle containers (pools, lanes, subprocesses) very well yet, but that’s all coming; keep up with new functionality on the bpmn.io blog.

Another lab project is the camunda BPM workbench, a debugging tool that allows inspection of the runtime state of processes alongside the process model, allowing breakpoints to be set in the process model (rather than in code). A console interface allows for interrogation and updating of the process variables as the developer steps through the process. The process model is displayed using the bpmn.io viewer.

At the end of all the roadmap sessions, the audience had a chance to say what was most important for them in terms of what will be implemented when; there were questions about case management, centralized model repositories, bulk runtime operations and other features.

A great half-day; this is the first time that I’ve attended an open source code community day, and it’s quite a different environment from a typical vendor conference. We’re about to enter the beer-drinking portion of the day so I will sign off for today; I’m giving the keynote at the main camunda user conference tomorrow morning, and not sure how much blogging that I’ll do during after that.

Disclaimer: camunda paid my travel expenses to be here today and tomorrow, and is providing a speaking fee for tomorrow’s keynote. I was not compensated for blogging, and the opinions here (and in my keynote) are my own.

camunda Community Day technical presentations

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.

Australia Post at camunda Community Day

I am giving the keynote at camunda’s BPMcon conference tomorrow, and since I arrived in Berlin a couple of days early, camunda invited me to attend their community day today, which is the open source community meeting. Nice to see such a great turnout — 70 or 80 people? — and I definitely wasn’t the one to travel the furthest to get here, since today’s opening presentation is from Rob Parker of Australia Post. Australia has a lot of the same issues as Canada when it comes to nation-wide services such as post, since we both have a lot of geography and not a lot of population: this means that a lot of services have to be delivered at a fiscal loss to sparsely-populated areas, with specific rules about what percentage of the population has to be within a certain distance of a postal outlet.

Post offices in particular are hard-hit by digital disruption; Australia Post has seen their letter delivery service decline by 1 billion articles (and the related revenue), even though the number of addresses to cover has increased. However, they have seen their parcel delivery business increase, even though this is a competitive business with courier companies. They’re also offering a number of other products, such as electronic bill payment, digital mail delivery and even passport interviews, which has driven them to create a more integrated multi-channel/multi-product architecture to be able to quickly bring new products to market. They’re using camunda BPM for their order management processses, both for customer orders and service fulfillment orders. Customer order processes support the various customer channels, then drive out one or more service order processes to fulfill a customer order.

They decided to use BPM in order to externalize processes from applications, making for more agile development and better reusability. They picked camunda because they wanted “just enough technology”: that is, they wanted to add process management to their existing Java application development environment, not rewrite all of their apps in a proprietary, monolithic BPMS app dev environment. camunda BPM is used to implement the multiple service order processes that might be kicked off by any given customer order, with their overall architecture handling the communication between the two order management layers: the customer order layer as a consumer for the service order layer producer.

Parker went into a lot of detail of how they have implemented this architecture, putting their BPM usage into the context of their overall technical architecture, and walked through the general process model for their service order that instantiates a dispatcher process for each customer order, which in turn instantiates a subprocess for each line item in the order. They really want to implement all of this in camunda, but are still using TIBCO for the dispatching process while they work out some of the sticky bits such as how subprocess cancelations are propagated to the parent process. They are also having some challenges with handling process versions, considering that they run 7×24: they need a mapping table that takes these temporal anomalies into consideration, so that the process version in use may be tied to the order date for longer-running order processes. They also created a business dashboard by modifying Cockpit, the camunda IT operations dashboard, to remove all of the “dangerous” operations while exposing the work in progress, and adding some additional functions such as searching by a business key.

Parker ended up with their outcomes, some expected, some less so: basically, BPMN 2.0 is really working for them both for business-IT collaboration and model-driven development; this level of business-IT alignment means that error handling can be shared, with business handling business errors, and IT handling IT errors. They found that developers became productive very quickly since they were just adding some tools to their existing familiar Java application development environment, although some had to be gently reminded to use the BPM capabilities instead of writing code.

It was great to see the reactions and interactions of the camunda team during the presentation: Australia Post is a “do-it-themselves” open source user of camunda, and as Parker discussed some of the shortcomings, they were obviously taking some notes for future work. The presentation finished with him being presented as an award for the non-camunda person who contributed most to the community forum discussions, suggesting that you get out of open source what you put into it.