Flowable introduction

Flowable

              Flowable provides a core set of open source business process engines that are compact and highly efficient. They provide a workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) platform for developers, system admins and business users. It provides a lightning fast, tried and tested dynamic BPMN process engine, with accompanying DMN decision tables and CMMN case management engines, all written in Java. They are Apache 2.0 licensed open source, with a committed community. All the engines can run embedded in a Java application, or as a service on a server, a cluster, and in the cloud. They can run as independent engines or services, or integrate together to provide a rich suite for business process management. They integrate perfectly with Spring. With rich Java and REST APIs, they are the ideal base for orchestrating human or robotic automation processing. They enable microservice orchestration or softwire the microservices themselves.

Architecture

Flowable provides four front-end applications named, IDM, Admin, Task and Editor. IDM app takes care of users and privileges. Admin app deals with all kinds of deployments, monitoring and tracking instances. Task app deals with task created for different processes. Editor or modeler app lets users create the process models. All these apps interact with Flowable engine using Flowable core REST API. In the core engine there are 4 engines named BPMN, Case Management, Decision/Rule Engine and Forms. Each of these can be used independently or together. When worked together they can shared the components like tasks as well.  For example we can create tasks in Case Management tool and create task in BPMN tool, and they can both go under user tasks. Flowable can sit on top of different range of architecture like databases, JVM etc. We can also customize and extend Flowable in a different ways.

Flowable Modules

·       BPMN Engine, the core Business Process Model and Notation workflow processor

·       CMMN Engine, a Case Management Model and Notation processor

·       DMN Engine, an implementation of a subset of Decision Model and Notation based business rules

·       Forms Engine, a forms service that can be used in conjunction with the Tasks web app or a custom application

·       Modeler, a web-based graphical authoring interface for editing BPMN, DMN and forms models

·       Designer, an Eclipse plug-in for designing BPMN models

·       IDM, an example web tool to manage user and group identities and privileges

·       Tasks, an example web application to start processes, view task queues, tasks and forms