{"id":1028,"date":"2011-08-07T09:02:44","date_gmt":"2011-08-07T07:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pleus.net\/blog\/?p=1028"},"modified":"2023-05-24T09:14:24","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T07:14:24","slug":"combining-activiti-and-camel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pleus.net\/blog\/?p=1028","title":{"rendered":"Combining Activiti and Camel?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems that that ServiceMix\/Camel and Activiti are growing together as you can read in the blog post Supersize Activiti with Mule ESB and Apache Camel<\/a> and Deploy Activiti as OSGi Bundles<\/a><\/p>\n

Activiti has its roots in business process management, whereas Camel comes from the area of enterprise integration. Both allow to describe and automate processes. Activiti uses BPMN, a graphical modeling language with an XML representation for persistence and execution. Camel uses a textual DSL which can also be expressed in XML. Grahpical modeling is also possible with the Fuse IDE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

BPMN example:<\/p>\n

\"BPMN<\/a>
BPMN process<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The BPMN XML representation is not intended to be written directly and can be hard to read.<\/p>\n

Camel example:<\/p>\n

from(\"file:\/\/start\")\r\n.choice()\r\n  .when(header(\"goldCustomer\").isEqualTo(\"true\"))\r\n    .to(\"bean:processor?method=grantDiscount\")\r\n    .to(\"direct:out\")\r\n  .otherwise()\r\n    .to(\"direct:out\");\r\n\r\nfrom(\"direct:out\")\r\n.to(\"file:\/\/end\");<\/pre>\n
Basically both examples are identical. The Camel example is more explicit and shows more technical details which are hidden in the BPMN example.<\/p>\n
Especially non technical users tend to think that a graphical process notation is easier to understand because it looks better. It might be true for simple processes like the one above. But for more complex processes textual DSLs are often easier to write and understand.<\/p>\n
Activiti and Camel overlap in many areas. Does it make sense to use them side by side anyway? I think yes, because neither Activiti nor Camel is complete in terms of features required by a fully\u00a0featured\u00a0SOA\/BPM runtime. Actually they complement each other\u00a0very well\u00a0in some areas.<\/p>\n
Unique features added by Camel:<\/p>\n