Author: rsoika

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Imixs-BPMN for Eclipse Oxygen

With the new version 1.8, Imixs-BPMN is now available for all current Eclipse platforms and also fully integrated into the latest version of Eclipse Oxygen.

Imixs-BPMN in  based on the Open Source BPMN modelling tooling for Eclipse Oxygen, which is currently available in version 1.4.3. See the Eclipse BPMN Homepage for what’s new. The current version 1.8 of Imixs-BPMN can be installed from here.

Imixs-BPMN takes the full advantage of all the capabilities from the BPMN 2.0 standard and complements them with the requirements to a modern workflow management system. Imixs-BPMN enhances the Eclipse BPMN2 modelling Framework with the aspects of a human-centric workflow model executable on the Imixs-Workflow Engine.

The Imixs-Workflow engine provides a set of modern Java Enterprise Services to create and manage process instances based on a BPMN 2.0 definition. The Imixs-Workflow engine can be embedded into a Java Enterprise application as well be deployed into a Microservice Architecture as a Docker Container. See the Imixs-Microservice Project for more details.

Also for older versions of the Eclipse Platforms (Eclipse Mars, Eclipse Neon) Imixs-BPMN is still are available.

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You Shouldn’t Manage Your Business Processes With Excel

Why do employees in companies repeatedly use Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint to manage business data and tasks?

Companies today have a variety of business applications in use. Some for legacy reasons, some for strategic reasons and some just because they are hip and make fun. And most of the times, these applications are not enough to cover all aspects of daily working life. A lot of tasks and data that need to be processed on a daily basis are often managed with EXCEL and POWERPOINT. This is not wrong in general and provides employees a way to prepare business figures in tables or display them clearly in a presentation. But often these applications are also abused for a kind of data management. But EXCEL is no database and POWERPOINT is not a messaging tool.  The problem is, that these tools often collect data that is needed to implement certain business processes and for which there is no suitable application available. In a short time, these solutions become indispensable and are passed down from generation to generation.

 

 

Continue reading “You Shouldn’t Manage Your Business Processes With Excel”

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New Workflow Rest API

With the next minor release 4.3. of Imixs-Workflow, which will be released shortly, the Open Source Workflow Engine supports a new Rest API. The new API is easier to apply. The result data output is mashed and  now always the same structure. This makes client implementations cleaner and easier to implement. At the same time, all functions of the human-centric workflow engine can be used via one common Rest API.

The old API is also still supported by the Imixs-Workflow engine. The old API can be used with the version prafix /v40/ in the request path.

Learn more about human-centric workflow here.

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Imixs Workflow 4.2.6 Released

The latest version 4.2.6 the open source workflow engine Imixs workflow is now officially released. Imixs-Workflow is a human centry workflow engine based on BPMN 2.0 and Java Enterprise. The new release contains several improvements of the Rest API as well as the Workflow Scheduler Feature which allows the automated execution of business processes.

Version 4.2.6 is also the official pre-release for the new Archive Feature of Imixs-workflow. The Imixs-Archive Feature is a comprehensive extension of the Imixs-Workflow technology. Process instances of a business process can now be stored and analyzed in an external archive system in a technology-neutral way. This also significantly improves the big-data analysis capabilities of business processes with the help of Imixs workflow.

The release Notes of version 4.2.6 can be viewed via GitHub.

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Imixs-BPMN – Version 1.4.7 Released

The open source project Imixs-BPMN has released version 1.4.7. Besides the integration into the Eclipse platform Oxygen, the new version offers various improvements in modeling business processes based on the BPMN 2.0 standard.

Imixs Workflow is a human centric workflow engine that allows to model and to execute human-2-human business processes. Based on the Eclipse platform, Imixs-BPMN offers a professional and stable platform for modeling within the BPMN 2.0 standard. Both, responsibilities and access rights, as well as individual business rules can be modelled graphically.

Version 1.4.7 now represents business rules – so called ‘ conditions ‘ – and access rights (ACL) in a graphical way. This makes it easier to create process models and control them during the design phase.

In addition, Imixs-BPMN now supports so-called ‘Conditional-Events’ and ‘Split-Events’. The former can be used to model decisions based on business rules. Split-Events support parallelism. Split-Events play an important role for the mapping of audit-safe business processes. These new features increase the transparency of complex processes within an organisation.

Imixs-BPMN is open source and part of the Imixs-Workflow technology. The IMIXS Software Solutions GmbH supports enterprises and organisations in the development and implementation of digital business processes.

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Improved Build and CI Support

The Imixs-Workflow project has now joined the Travis CI platform. With this CI and Build plattform the current build status of Imixs-Workflow can be easily monitored by the community. This increases the transparency and stability of our open source project. This Travis CI runs all the tests of the Imixs-Workflow and Imixs-BPM automatically. The check-in of pull requests will also be monitored. Committing improvements and bug fixes by the community becomes now easier.

The current build status can be checked here.

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Imixs-BPMN – Data Objects

With the latest version 4.2.5, the Imixs-Workflow Engine, is now supporting BPMN Data Objects. This kind of model element can be used to model more complex wokflows processing input data:

With this new feature any kind of data object – e.g. a XML or HTML templates – can be associated with a BPMN Task. As a result, the task element will provide these data objects in the new item ‘dataObject’. This item can be injected into a running process instance. See the following code example which is injecting a ‘Invoice HTML template’ into a workitem:

...
ItemCollection task = model.getTask(1000);
List<List<String>> dataObjects = task.getItemValue("dataObjects");
if (dataObjects.size()>0) {
    List<String> firstDataObject = (List<String>) dataObjects.get(0);
    String templateName = firstDataObject.get(0);
    String content = firstDataObject.get(1);
    logger.info("DataObject name=" + templateName);
    logger.info("DataObject content=" + content);
  }
  if ("Invoice Template".equals(templateName) {
    // inject data...
    workitem.repalceItemValue("htmldocument",content);
  }
}
....

DataObjects are part of Imixs-Office-Workflow Version 3.2  to provide an easy and flexible way to create documents and templates during a business process.

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Imixs-Cloud – a Lightweight Docker Swarm Environment

The Imixs-Project started the new subproject Imixs-Cloud.

Imixs-Cloud is a conceptual infrastructure project, describing a way to create a server environment for business applications. One of the main objectives of this project is to focus on simplicity and transparency. The general idea is to setup a lightweight docker based infrastructure with docker swarm. Within this infrastructure business applications like Imixs-Office-Workflow can be deployed in a fast and easy way.
Imixs-Cloud is developed as part of the Open Source project Imixs-Workflow and continuous under development. To contribute to this project please report any issues here. All source are available on Github.

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Imixs-Workflow 4.2 Released

With version 4.2.0, the second minor release of Imixs-Workflow version 4 is now available. After the stability and performance improvements of version 4 were confirmed with the minor update 4.1, now the first feature update has been released. Imixs-Workflow 4.2 offers a number of additional features and technical improvements.

BPMN Modelling

Version 4.2 offers some awesome new possibilities to model a business process with BPMN 2.0. This includes, for example, the modeling of conditional events. A conditional event can be used to evaluate the output of an event during the processing life-cycle. The conditions can be easily added into the output flows.

conditional events

The business rules can be written in JavaScript or any script language supported by the JVM. E.g ’JavaScript or ‘Groovy’.

Another modelling improvement are the so called “Split-Events”. A Split-Event can be used to create new versions of the current process instance during the current processing life-cycle.

split event

A Split-Event creates a new version of the current process instance that can be immediately processed in parallel or stored in an archive state.

These new functions make modeling business processes more transparent and clearer.

The CDI Observer Pattern

The Imixs-Workflow engine provides now an observer pattern based on a set of CDI events. The events are fired when a process instance is loaded or updated. The observer pattern is part of the Java Enterprise Specification and can be used to adapt the behavior of workflow functionality in a powerful way. For example, the new archive feature adapts the persistence mechanism of Imixs-Workflow to transparently archive business data into various external archive systems.

Simulation & Testing

The project provides now a new Simulation Engine to be used to simulate the outcome of a concrete process instance based on a BPMN 2.0 model. This can be used in test- as also in production mode and enhances the test functionality of Imixs-Workflow. A lot additional improvements in JUnit tests are also part of this update.

All these additional functions increase the stability of Imixs-Workflow and allow developers the creation of highly scalable business applications. Find all release notes on GitHub.

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