Is jBPM dying? What is the future of jBPM and Activiti BPMN?

Question

I have heard that the developers of "jBPM" have transferred to "Activiti BPMN 2" in recent times (ex: Tom).

I am wondering about is whether the support for jBPM will be over or not.. Besides, I would be glad to hear your ideas about if the improvements of Activiti BPMN will make it better or useful than jBPM as time goes on?

I would also like to know what are the pros/cons between them.

Ascomycete

Answer 1

Activiti is an interesting project for several reasons:

1. They intend to commoditize the engine. For that reason they use the Apache Software License. So far several companies are backing that project. The "business model" is somewhat similar to that used by OpenStack.

2. It makes sense to have one BPMN 2.0 engine which is used and can be used by everybody. This does include jBoss (but I doubt that they will switch soon).

Pecoraro

Many thanks for your reply. Well, which is better to choose then? What should I take into consideration for a comparison in order to decide the right one for my projects? If you don't have enough time to explain, it also will be grate for me to hear some blog/site/artical or ebook advice about this subject. Take care – Ascomycete

It depends: Activiti is not yet production ready! Have a look at their roadmap: docs.codehaus.org/display/ACT/Roadmap So far the planned releases have been in time and with almost all the scheduled features. The release of version 5.0 is planned for November 1, 2010. In other words: it really depends on the schedule and character of your projects. My suggestion: spend an hour to download the version which was released today, play a bit with it and begin reading the documentation. – Pecoraro

Answer 2

History Lesson:

jBPM and its resultant projects:

1. jBPM is created at Redhat as a workflow engine adhering to BPMN 2.0 specification
2. Creators of jBPM leave jBPM project and Redhat to join Alfresco. There they create, Activi.

3. Creators of Activi leave Alfresco and start a new BPM tool, Flowable, which is a fork from Activi.

4. Camunda is another BPM tool forked from Activi. They also adhere to BPMN 2.0 Specification. They have Zeebe, a cloud-native BPM with connectors to Java, gRPC, Elasticsearch and Kubernetes.

Non-jBPM workflow/orchestration tools:

1. Uber cadence
2. Apache Airflow
3. Netflix Conductor : Microservice workflow orchestration engine.

Aetolia

Camunda Fork 4. happened before 3. – Swash

Answer 3

I withdrew my previous answer from '14. From today's perspective the answer should certainly include jBPM, Activiti, Flowable and Camunda. This is the selection one ends up with when looking for the significant BPMN2 standard-based open-source workflow engines.

IMHO, jBPM remains very Java-centric, feels like an old-school open-source product built by a community and still shows a lack of product management.

Major parts of the Activiti contributors lefts and forked Camunda and Flowable. It seems like Activiti's focus is around the needs of Alfresco and their DMS.

If you consider Google trends of relevance to the answer, it currently looks like this: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=jBPM,Camunda,Activiti,Flowable

Swash

Answer 4

Please check out jBPM 7: https://www.jbpm.org/learn/releases.html

Support for and development of jBPM is definitely still ongoing!

(Btw, jBPM also uses BPMN 2.0)

Inconceivable

At first place, thanks. But I can already see the continuation of jbpm for now. On the other hand, my quest. is about the future improvements and support for these technologies, as I wrote above. Thanks anyway. – Ascomycete

Answer 5

jBPM and Activiti Both are BPMN engines But on Comparing both of them

• jBPM is more complex then Activiti

• it is really easy to integrate with Activiti as compared to jBPM

but still jbpm is under development phase so is activity

Whatever is your requirement, everything is available in jbpm ,it is very good BPM but as compared to Activity it is bit complex and not so fruitful.

So if you are yet to decide which bpm I would suggest you to go for Activity because integration of anything with Activity say LDAP or Spring is preety easier as compared to JBPM.

Also you can easily learn Activity because of good userguide and documentation provided by community, but in case of JBPM userguide as well as documentation neither are so helpful. Also Developer guide book is also not up to the mark.

Well ball is in your court ,you have to take decision.

All the Best.

chk this Link

http://www.mastertheboss.com/activiti-bpmn/jbpm-vs-activiti-which-to-choose

Amatol

Answer 6

Well jBPM is surely not dying although there's a strong departure from the 3.x and 4.x releases. here, you can read more about jBPM and Activiti Cheers Francesco

Carbine

Answer 7

As I understand it, jBPM 5 is drools flow which just got renamed. So it started as being part of the drools business rules engine,and is now the successor of jBPM 4. So i dont think it really matters that the jBPM project lead moved to activiti...

Dispense

Answer 8

jBPM has traditionally had one big drawback; usability. Has always been very powerful, but the hardest to use and integrate with, a major reason in Activiti's popularity and jBPMs decline in usage.

However, this year sees the resurgence of jBPM with the new Version 6 rolled out as well as the release of the Wira platform ( http://www.a1.io/a1io_blog/wira-for-jbpm/ )that provides a really good jBPM execution framework.

Hellkite

Answer 9

No, jBPM is not dying but more simpler and lightweight versions of BPMN are coming out recent days like Camunda, Flowable, Activiti and list goes on. jBPM is one of the old player in the race and certainly loosing to competition in terms of innovations, new features, complexity, deployment, support, stability, community etc. etc. compared to these other tool. Also redhat PAM is another reason which can be purchased with 10X cheaper price than current BPM leaders like Pega, IBM BPM etc.

Bottom the line - jBPM is not dying and will get support.

Catalyze