Recently, we announced that Drools Flow is going to use the BPMN 2.0 XML as the underlying XML serialization format. One of the main advantages of using a standard is that it makes interoperability with other tools much easier. We’ve been working with the Oryx team to provide web-based editing of processes, which can then be imported and executed on the Drools Flow engine.
Oryx is an open-source project for web-based modeling of business processes, supporting various formats like BPMN, petri-nets, etc. The BPMN 2.0 web-based editor is being developed as part of the Signavio-Oryx Academic Initiative, a joint effort by the Berlin-based startup company Signavio, the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam and other universities, which offers a web platform for collaborative process modeling. The platform includes a BPMN 2.0 editor that covers all diagram types. Parts of the platform are made available as open-source through the Oryx project.
The following screencast shows how you could create a simple BPMN 2.0 process using the Oryx editor and then import it into the Drools Eclipse plugin. Here, you could for example add more execution details, debug and test the process, and execute it on the Drools Flow engine, as we already showed in earlier screencasts.
[Note that the screencast shows us transferring the BPMN 2.0 process from Oryx into Drools Flow by simply exporting it as a file using the BPMN 2.0 XML format. We are of course planning to provide more user-friendly integration, by for example integrating this with Guvnor as the process repository.]
