IMIXS-WORKFLOW Blog

While Imixs-Office-Workflow comes with PostgreSQL as its default database, you can easily configure it to work with Microsoft SQL Server. This guide walks you through the setup process when running Imixs-Office-Workflow on Wildfly.

The ‘Event-Driven Business Architecture’ is the idea of a software architecture that centers business applications on events and processes. In the following, I will explain its core concepts and describe how building business applications around events can enhance architectural flexibility.

What is an Event?

When we talk about ‘Event-Driven Business Architecture’, one of the first questions that naturally arises is: What exactly is an event? Let’s examine the characteristics of an event in detail.

First of all, an event is something that happens, either unexpectedly or as a planned occurrence. Events are omnipresent in our business world – from a new customer request to the sending of an invoice or the receipt of a payment. When these events occur regularly and follow a defined sequence, we speak of a process. For example, the three events mentioned could be part of an order process.

From a technical perspective, an event has several properties that describe its nature. The most fundamental property is the timestamp indicating when the event occurred. Another crucial property is the actor who initiated the event – this could be a customer submitting a new request, an employee creating an invoice, or a technical system such as a transport system’s control unit sending tracking information. And last but not least, we have the kind of the event which describes the business context it occurred in. This typically relates to what we call a ‘business process’ and defines the formal framework the event is bound to.

Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of collecting, analyzing, and presenting business data to help organizations make better decisions. It transforms data into meaningful insights enabling companies to understand their performance, market trends, and competitive position. In this blog post I will explain how you can use BI together with a Business Process Management System.

Most BI tools follow the approach to transform raw data from a database centric business application into aggregated data for analysis. Typically those tools are built on SQL based databases which makes it easy to group data or compute totals across different queries. Of course, this approach requires a well-designed data structure and a deep understanding of the technical relationships between different information domains. Thus, it is usually a collaboration between business analysts and developers to collect this kind of data.

But what if you have a business process management system instead of a ERP software? In such a software system, there are floating and volatile workflows that generate the data to be analyzed. For example, a “complaint management” business process is more likely to look at timings, processing periods, and costs over time. The analysis of such processes in a BI tool is often very difficult to realize with conventional SQL queries. So the question is: what could be the right architecture to process this type of data in a BI platform?

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations need workflow solutions that can adapt quickly to changing requirements while maintaining operational efficiency. While there are several workflow engines available in the market, Imixs-Workflow stands out as a compelling choice, particularly for organizations seeking to put process control directly in the hands of business users. Why can Imixs-Workflow be an alternative to Camunda?

As organizations evaluate workflow engines for their process automation needs, Camunda has established itself as a powerful solution, particularly for development teams implementing complex program logic through BPMN models. However, for organizations seeking a more business-oriented approach, Imixs-Workflow emerges as a compelling alternative that addresses different yet equally important needs in the process automation landscape.

Today I was asked from customers how to compare Camunda with the Imixs-Workflow engine. This question often comes up when projects try to evaluate and compare workflow engines. My short answer to this question is: You shouldn’t compare these two engines. In the following, I will try to explain this in more detail.

First of all, I would like to make it clear that this is not an evaluation of the two engines, but only to show the different criteria that come into question for an evaluation. So first, let’s look at the similarities between Camunda and Imixs.

Both engines are open source frameworks. Both are implemented in Java and both support the BPMN 2.0 standard. But these are already the only similarities that both frameworks have in common. You could now argue that Camunda is essentially based on Spring and Imixs-Workflow is a Jakarta EE implementation. One could also highlight the different modeling concepts that both frameworks represent (I have talked about this some times ago). But all these are details of architecture and implementation in my opinion. The main difference is quite another one.

In this short tutorial I will show how to build a business application with the Business Process Modelling Notation – BPMN. This approach differs from the usual data-centric approach as we focus on process management instead of data processing.

Data Processing vs. Process Management

When we follow the classic approach building a Data-Centric Business Application, we usually first design a data schema. The data schema defines what kind of data can be managed. The application allows us to create new data sets, edit existing data and of course search for data.

In a Process-Centric Business Application we instead first try to answer the question how data should be processed to give each actor the best access to information to reach a specific business goal. And this kind of question becomes more and more important in our today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. BPMN offers the perfect approach to model a workflow with its business goals from the beginning to the end. BPMN models can be created with various tools like for example the Open Source BPMN designer Open-BPMN.

The big advantage of BPMN is that it does not only give all stake holders a clear understanding about the process, a BPMN 2.0 Model can also be executed by a suitable process engine. This “low-code” or “model-driven” approach leads to a much more flexible way to implement business applications. Of course, data still plays an important role and workflow engines allow us to manage business data in various ways. So let’s see how this works…