Open source BPM platform from camunda

The camunda BPM stack
Source: Camunda

Berlin-based BPM (Business Process Management) experts camunda have renamed their camunda fox product to camunda BPM and have also released its source code under the open source Apache License 2. The product is based on the Activiti BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation).

Activiti was started under the leadership of Tom Baeyens in spring 2010; Baeyens began working for Alfresco after having previously worked at Red Hat's JBoss jBPM project. The executive has since turned his back on Alfresco and Activiti and has recently announced that he will start his own company. Companies that were involved in Activiti other than Alfresco included Signavio and, of course, camunda.

The open source camunda BPM allows business processes to be automated. The system is based on a "less code" approach, which means that the BPM engine embeds itself into the Java development environment. In addition to the camunda engine and the Activiti fork, it consists of a JAX-RS-based REST API, Spring and CDI (Contexts and Dependency Injection) integration, camunda Cycle for round-trip engineering and a web-based tool for process operations. In addition to the open source components – all of which, except for the Eclipse-licensed BPMN Modeller, are released under the Apache License – camunda commercially markets further features such as a component for WebSphere integration and plugins for handling large amounts of data.

Bernd Rücker, founder of camunda, says that one reason for the decision to fork Activiti was the product's focus on BPM and Java. Rücker added that camunda BPM also allows his company to meet its customers' business/IT alignment requirements. The Activiti project originally had a purely developer-centric approach, he explained. Talking to The H's associates at heise Developer, Rücker said that he thinks a part of the Activiti community will support the new BPM platform. The executive noted that he anticipates that there will be few interoperability issues this year because the process engine's code base is currently still the same. According to Rücker, the developers will try to allow people to migrate for as long as possible.

The source code for camunda BPM is available on GitHub.

(fab)