BPMN for spring boot 2

Question

We have started new project on spring stack and using latest versions. But we have workflow requirement and I used activiti in past. But as I see there is no spring boot 2 support for activiti and camunda. Can anybody suggest which BPM is best that can be integrated with spring boot 2.

Answer 1

You will find a bunch of Spring Boot 2 starters in the Flowable github repo.

The documentation explains step-by-step how to create a BPM enabled Spring Boot application. There is also the blog post The road to Spring Boot 2.0 that the improved support for Flowable within Spring Boot as part of the Flowable 6.3.0 release.

You ask for suggestions on which BPM is best. Well, I cannot be objective since I am part of the Flowable Team, but I can say that our Spring Boot implementation is pretty neat:

• All engines are supported (BPMN, CMMN, DMN), both embedded and exposing their respective REST APIs.
• There is an automatic configuration of Spring Security to use the Flowable IDM engine (in case no other custom security is configured).
• There is no "EE" version of the starter. Flowable provides Spring Boot 2 support 100% Open Source.
• The Spring Actuator integration is quite powerful.
• Did I mention Open Source? ;-)

In order to get the all engines you would need to use the flowable-spring-boot-starter(-rest) dependency. The (-rest) needs to be used if you want the Flowable REST APIs to be automatically configured.

There is also the option to run the BPMN, CMMN or DMN engines in standalone mode. For that you would need one of the following dependencies:

• flowable-spring-boot-starter-process(-rest)
• flowable-spring-boot-starter-cmmn(-rest)
• flowable-spring-boot-starter-dmn(-rest)

So, compare for yourself, but for me, it's pretty clear and of course I am open to discussion.

Answer 2

The Activiti is working on Activiti Cloud fully based on Spring Boot 2 and Spring Cloud Finchley (targeting kubernetes deployments, but it can be used outside kubernetes if that is not your thing) if you are looking for a BPMN runtime for Cloud Native applications. We are working hard on releasing the first Beta1 release at the moment, and we will very welcome feedback about it. Hope this helps.