Hi all,
I have been recently made aware that many of the original developers of
Activiti (including the team leader Tijs Rademakers) started a new fork,
Flowable [1].
The detailed reasons for forking can be read from [2] but, besides
these, I think we need to decide whether to stick with Activiti as our
predefined workflow engine, or if instead it is be the case to move to
Flowable.
It seems that one of the main reasons behind the fork is the fact that
the original team wasn't able to cut out the new 6.0.0 release (which is
being worked since long time); the new team has recently published 6.0.0
[3] and also a maintenance 5.22.0 [4] (which is the version we are
currently using, but from Activiti).
Flowable 6 looks really interesting, especially for the cleaning and the
refactoring they made - which also solved the issue raised a while ago
in [5] about the Activiti Modeler license: it seems that the new
Flowable UI Modeler is completely AL 2.0 compliant; moreover, they
introduced some interesting support for multi-tenancy [6] which we can
leverage.
I would propose to:
1. open an issue to make the 2.1 series (e.g. the current master
branch) work with Flowable 6, replacing Activiti
2. open an issue to provide an additional module for the 2.0 series
(e.g. the current 2_0_X branch), named workflow-flowable, mostly a
clone of workflow-activiti [7] but with different dependencies;
workflow-activiti will remain the default choice, but people could
switch to Flowable on their own deployments if they will
WDYT?
Regards.
[1] http://www.flowable.org/
[2] http://www.flowable.org/blog/2016/10/12/flowable-and-activiti.html
[3] http://www.flowable.org/blog/2017/02/15/flowable-6.0.0-release.html
[4] http://www.flowable.org/blog/2016/10/13/flowable-5.22.0-release.html
[5]
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SYNCOPE-439?focusedCommentId=13829912&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-13829912
[6]
http://forum.flowable.org/t/support-for-additional-multi-tenancy-models/175
[7] https://github.com/apache/syncope/tree/2_0_X/core/workflow-activiti
--
Francesco Chicchiriccò
Tirasa - Open Source Excellence
http://www.tirasa.net/
Member at The Apache Software Foundation
Syncope, Cocoon, Olingo, CXF, OpenJPA, PonyMail
http://home.apache.org/~ilgrosso/
