Blog

When I worked for a BPM software vendor, I often told people that I wasn’t too worried about open source software because BPM is a different animal than many other software categories-  user experience is critical;  the problem-space is wide, rather than narrow; and it requires seamless coordination of many different activities, rather than just a few activities.  Add to that, the standards and specifications hadn’t firmed up yet, as they had for databases. However, the environment is evolving:

• BPMN 2.0 provides what might be the first standard that is complete enough for open source software to use as a basis for competing with the commercial vendors
• User Interface software development tools have improved.  It is easier to produce visually appealing applications that run inside a browser than it ever was before (thanks to HTML 5, AJAX, and several libraries built to leverage both).
• The cloud makes potential deployment of complicated software components easier to manage.

This sets the stage for a new round of open source software projects.  Tom Baeyens and Joram Barrez (formerly of the jBPM team) have joined Alfresco and are building a new BPM solution with a tight integration to ECM (Alfresco) in mind. They’re calling the new effort “Activiti”, just announced yesterday.  The alpha is already up on their website and downloadable. Sandy Kemsley was briefed last week and has a very good summary written up. I also had the pleasure of a briefing – quite flattered that Tom and company thought of us as well.  There are a couple of developments with Activiti that I already find refreshing:

1. They’re using a version of Signavio’s modeler.  Gero Decker’s team produces one of the better web-based BPMN 2 compliant modeling tools out there.
2. The installation process was pretty painless – even on my Mac – for a developer.  You need Java and Ant to run the install and build the demo, but clearly it would be a small effort to create a consumer-usable installer if that was warranted.  Since the install is really for the server components, I don’t know if an end-user consumable install is really necessary. Authors would just point their browser at the server.  Did I mention that the whole stack ran just fine, natively, on my Mac as well as a Windows VM?
3. The documentation is already pretty comprehensive, and gets down to no-nonsense details (not true for many commercial products).
4. There’s already a REST API.  I like the early emphasis on interfaces, APIs, and framework – because that effort will be rewarded by making it easier for contributors to be productive.

There’s still a focus on embedding the engine inside other software – and on more liberal licensing terms (Apache license) that should make it easier for software companies to adopt it.  And I think the market is ripe for an open source BPM platform that leverages standard underlying technologies and is built from the beginning to allow for cloud-based deployment.  I think they’re off to a good start to create something that is really developer-friendly. So what are the concerns?

1. It isn’t clear (to me, yet) what the long-term involvement / direction of Signavio is – after all, Signavio has a for-profit business of hosting modeling in the cloud.  But at some point I think a true open source project will want to be able to improve on the modeler as well as other components at the engine level.
2. There’s a lot of work yet to do. Right now much of the engine isn’t yet implemented.  This is actually apparent from the documentation – and I love that the team had the courage to expose what they have, and what they don’t have ready at this point.
3. Earlier I mentioned developer-friendly… what about user-friendly??

Well, as to the last concern, I’ll give my 2 cents.  I think for a commercial product, user-friendly is one of the out-of-the-gate concerns. For an open source project, developer-friendly has to come first – because if it is developer-friendly, then additional developers can join the team and build the user-friendly layers.  If you start out with something relatively user-friendly but not developer friendly, it is as though you were “charging” your developers more to work on your software – because they have to give up more of their time before they can produce something useful. Already two of us at bp3 have downloaded the alpha, installed it and run it.  We may end up investing some time in the project ourselves.  Clearly Alfresco and the other companies involved in the project are putting a lot of energy into this effort, and more PR behind it than I felt jBPM ever got as part of RedHat.  They’re off to a good start, with ambitious goals – and as they say, dream no little dreams…