Lightweight workflow engine for Java

Question

Is it better to write a new workflow engine or to use an existing BPM engine  jBPM 5  Activiti 5   My application is a web based application and performance is important  My doubt is whether using jBPM Activiti will be a performance overhead compared to writing a simple workflow engine   If I go with self implementation  I will miss visualization of workflow  For performance it can be traded

User · Accepted Answer

This really depends on your requirements. First, see if you really need a workflow engine (this or other sources). Unless you really need it, probably you should avoid it.

If you really need what provides a workflow engine, I would pick one that is already built. People who works with jbpm or activiti have much more experience than you in building workflow engines, so it is probably already tunned to improve performance.

User · Answer

Yes  in my perspective there is no reason why you should write your own  Most of the Open Source BPM Workflow frameworks are extremely flexible  you just need to learn the basics   If you choose jBPM you will get much more than a simple workflow engine  so it depends what are you trying to build   Cheers

User · Answer

I d recommend you yo use an out-of-the-box solution  Given that the development of a workflow engine requires a vast amount of resources and time  a ready-made engine is a better option  Have a look at Workflow Engine  It s a lightweight component that enables you to add custom executable workflows of any complexity to any Java solutions

User · Answer

I agree with the guys that already posted responses here  or part of their responses anyway  P  but as here in the company where I am currently working we had a similar challenge I took the liberty of adding my opinion  based on our experience   We needed to migrate an application that was using the jBPM workflow engine in a production related applications and as there were quite a few challenges in maintaining the application we decided to see if there are better options on the market  We came to the list already mentioned    Activiti  planned to try it through a prototype  Bonita  planned to try it through a prototype    jBPM  disqualified due to past experience    We decided not to use jBPM anymore as our initial experience with it was not the best  besides this the backwards compatibility was broken with every new version that was released   Finally the solution that we used  was to develop a lightweight workflow engine  based on annotations having activities and processes as abstractions  It was more or less a state machine that did it s job   Another point that is worth mentioning when discussing about workflow engine is the fact they are dependent on the backing DB - it was the case with the two workflow engines I have experience with  SAG webMethods and jPBM  - and from my experience that was a little bit of an overhead especially during migrations between versions   So  I would say that using an workflow engine is entitled only for applications that would really benefit from it and where most of the workflow of the applications is spinning around the workflow itself otherwise there are better tools for the job    wizards  Spring Web Flow  self built state machines   Regarding state machines  I came across this response that contains a rather complete collection of state machine java frameworks   Hope this helps

User · Answer

You can look   Apache Ant to build a workflow engine Its much more robust and is a pure state-machine with most of the requirements needed already built in   Apart from that you can also embed different dynamic code scripts in Java Groovy JS language and hence that makes it very powerful  Also it allows tasks extension   There is some fair amount of tooling around it or you can build on top of it if a IDE is needed   Update   Spring state machine is also available which is relatuvely light weight and not bloated   https   projects spring io spring-statemachine

User · Answer

Java based workflow engines like Activiti  Bonita or jBPM support a wide range of the BPMN 2 0 specification  Therefore  you can model processes in a graphical way  In addition  some of those engines have simulation capabilities like Activiti  with Activiti Crystalball   If you code the processes on your own  you aren  t as flexible when you need to change the process  Therefore  I would also advice to use a java based BPM engine    I did a research concerning BPMN 2 0 based Open Source Engines  Here are the key-points which were relevant for our concrete use case   1  Bonita   Bonita has a zero-coding approach which means that they provide an easy to use IDE to build your processes without the need for coding  To achieve that  Bonita has the concept of connectors  For example  if you want to consume a web service  they provide you with a graphical wizzard  The downside is that you have to write the plain XML SOAP-envelope manually and copy it in a graphical textbox  The problem with this approach is that you only can realize use cases which are intended by Bonita  If you want to integrate a system which Bonita did not developed a connector for  you have to code such a connector on your own which is very painful  For example  Bonita offers a SOAP connector for consuming SOAP web services  This connector only works with SOAP 1 2  but not for SOAP 1 1  http   community bonitasoft com answers consume-soap-11-webservices-bonita-secure-web-service-connector   If you have a legacy application with SOAP 1 1  you cannot integrate this system easily in your process  The same is true for databases  There are only a few database connectors for dedicated database versions  If you have a version not matching to a connector  you have to code this on your own   In addition  Bonita has no support for LDAP or Active Directory Sync in the free community edition which is quite a showstopper for a production environment  Another thing to consider is that Bonita is licensed under the GPL   LGPL license which could cause problems when you want to integrate Bonita in another enterprise application  In addition  the community support is very weak  There are several posts which are more than 2 years old and those posts are still not answered   Another important thing is Business-IT-Alignment  Modelling processes is a collaborative discipline in which IT AND the business analysts are involed  That is why you need adequate tools for both user groups  e g  an Eclipse Plugin for the developers and an easy to use web modeler for the business people   Bonita only offers Bonita Studio  which needs to be installed on your machine  This IDE is quite technical and not suitable for business users  Therefore  it is very hard to realize Business-IT-Alignment with Bonita   Bonita is a BPM tool for very trivial and easy processes  Because of the zero-coding approach  the lerning curve is very low and you can start modelling very fast  You need less programming skills and you are able to realize your processes without the need of coding  But as soon as your processes become very complex  Bonita might not be the best solution because of the lack of flexibility  You only can realize use cases which are intended by Bonita   2  jBPM   jBPM is a very powerful Open Source BPM Engine which has a lot of features  The web modeler even supports prefabricated models of some van der Aalst workflow patterns  workflowpatterns com   Business-IT-Alignment is realizable because jBPM offers an Eclipse integration as well as a web-based modeler  A bit tricky is that you only can define forms in the web modeler  but not in the Eclipse Plugin  as far as I know  To sum up  jBPM is a good candidate for using in a company  Our showstopper was the scalability  jBPM is based on the Rules-Engine Drools  This leads to the fact that whole process instances are persisted as BLOBS in the database  This is a critial showstopper when you consider searching and scalability   In addition  the learning curve is very high because of the complexity  jBPM does not offer a Service Task like the BPMN-Standard suggests In contrast  you have to define your own Java Service tasks and you have to register them manually in the engine  which results in quite low level programming   3  Activiti   In the end  we went with Activiti because this is a very easy to use framework-based engine  It offers an Eclipse Plugin as well as a modern AngularJS Web-Modeler  In this way  you can realize Business-IT-Alignment  The REST-API is secured by Spring Security which means that you can extend the Engine very easily with Single Sign-on features  Because of the Apache License 2 0  there is no copyleft which means you are completely free in terms of usage and extensibility which is very important in a productive environment   In addition  the BPMN-coverage is very good  Not all BPMN-elements are realized  but I do not know any engine which does that   The Activiti Explorer is a demo frontend which demonstrates the usage of the Activiti APIs  Since this frontend is based on VAADIN  it can be extended very easily  The community is very active which means that you can get help very fast if you have any problems   Activiti offers good integration points for external form-technologies which is very important for a productive usage  The form-technologies of all candidates are very restrictive  Therefore  it makes sense to use a standard form-technology like XForms in combination with the Engine  Even such more complex things are realizable via the formKey-Attribute   Activiti does not follow the zero-coding approach which means that you will need a bit of coding if you want to orchestrate services  But even the communication with SOAP services can be achieved by using a Java Service Task and Apache CXF  The coding effort is low   I hope that my key points can help by taking a decision  To be clear  this is no advertisment for Activiti  The right product choice depends on the concrete use cases  I only want to point out the most important points in our project

User · Answer

I would like to add my comments  When you choose a ready engine  such as jBPM  Activity and others  there are plenty of them   then you have to spend some time learning the system itself  this may not be an easy task  Especially  when you need only to automate small piece of code   Then  when an issue occurs you have to deal with the vendor s support  which is not as speedy as you would imagine  Even pay for some consultancy    And  last  a most important reason  you have to develop in the ecosystem of the engine  Although  the vendors tend to say that their system are flexible to be incorporated into any systems  this may not be case  Eventually you end up re-writing your application to match with the BPM ecosystem

User · Answer

I recently open sourced Piper  https   github com creactiviti piper  a distributed and very light weight  Spring-based  workflow engine

User · Answer

The question is what you really want to achieve when you asking for a workflow engine   The general goal which you would like to achieve by using a workflow engine  is to become more flexible in changing your business logic during runtime  The modelling part is surely one of the most important here  BPMN 2 0 is a de-facto standard in this area and all of the discussed engines support this standard   The second goal is to control the business process in the way of describing the  what should happen when     questions  And this part has a lot to do with the business requirements you are confronted within your project   Some of the workflow engines  Activity  JBPM  can help you to answer this requirement by  coding  your processes  This means that you model the  what should happen when    paradigm in a way  where you decide which part of your code  e g a task or an event  should be executed by the workflow engine in various situations  A lot of discussion is going about this concept  And developers naturally ask whether this may not even be implemented by themselves   It is in fact not so easy as it seems at the first glance   Some other workflow engines  Imixs-Workflow  Bonita  can help you to answer the  what should happen when     requirement in a more user-centric way  This is the area of Human-centric business process management  which supports human skills and activities by a task orientated workflow-engine  The focus is more on the distribution of tasks and processes inside an organisation  The workflow engine helps you to distribute a task to a certain user or user group and to secure  log and monitor a long running business process  Maybe these are the things you do not really want to implement by yourself   So my advice is  not to mix things that need to be considered separately  because workflow covers a very wide area

User · Answer

CamundaBPM is one option  You can check here  https   camunda com

[java] Lightweight workflow engine for Java

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