Process to implement
). No prepared components were allowed and the audience could watch all three candidates simultaneously on three beamers. The process orchestrated an existing REST/JSON and SOAP/WebService (from the internet) and we had to handle an asynchronous callback with correlation. Today I post the video from the cookshow (German) as well as an screencast I recorded afterwards of how I developed that process (English). And I try to answer the question I always get first: “Who won?“.
I actually loved the format of that cookshow. On the one hand it was really fun and on the other hand I think it was really informative for theparticipants – and we got really good feedback. The only downside was, that I personally could not watch the other cooks implementing with SAP and Oracle! Hence I cannot really comment their “menu” in detail. And to be honest I think there was no winner (I have my diplomatic day today ) – all teams came up with a working solution – cool! And there were a couple of thing in common:
- All teams used BPMN 2.0 – no discussion about that.
- All teams have got it running without prepared components (even if rumours tell that some teams have prepared some XML Schema – thank good we do not need complex schemas
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)Hence I think the attendees could see with their own eyes that process execution with BPMN 2.0 works pretty well.
The differences
I think the difference of camunda fox compared with other vendors in the market got pretty clear and is pretty good expressed by the formula “BPM + Java“.
We strictly follow a “best of breed” approach, meaning we leverage existing standard and frameworks of the Java cosmos for standard problems. The examples in the cookshow were: We used JAX-RS (Java standard) for REST, Apache CXF (the de-facto standard framework for WebServices in Java) and Apache commons email for email. And in the demo I used JSF (a Java standard for UI’s) for the UI (but you could use HTML5, GWT, Vaadin, Portlets or whatever you might want to for that).
It got pretty clear that you do not nead more time or effort if you don’t have the shiny, magical, graphical wizards. Of course you need some knowledge of which framework to use and how to apply it – but i think that is something most Java programmers have anyway. And then Java programmers are much more productive in this kind of environment using the tools and framework they know instead of being forced into some proprietary vendor stuff.
By the way: I developed the whole process test driven! I had a unit test for the complete process. Ok, because of the limited time only for one scenario and without any mocks (I even send the email in the unit test), but that is something which you could easily add.
And keep in mind that we were the only Open Source project among the participants – not a small argument if you think of pricing of the big vendors.
In short I would say: If you have (Java) know how or developers on board camunda fox ist the best choice – if you don’t have that it might not fit at all. Even if we have non Java shops as customers which simply searched for BPMN 2.0 + Open Source.
The source code
You can find the source code from the original cookshow online: https://bitbucket.org/camunda/outer-space-demos/src/master/oop2013-cookshow. Try it out yourself on camunda fox today!
Recorded session (German)
You can find the video of the full session at the OOP here (it is in German): Video of the OOP cookshow.
Screencast (English)
Because you cannot read any code in the video above I screencasted the whole demo afterwards, in HD quality and in English! Unfortunatley the freely available SOAP WebService was broken at that time – so I could not implement the whole process using it – sorry! But I think the idea comes through. Have fun watching it and don’t hestitate to give feedback:
