BPMN support

[samarpan-b]

How about supporting industry standard business workflow orchestration format BPMN for building and execution of workflows ? Is that anywhere in roadmap?

[coltmcnealy-lh]

We are thinking about having an adapter that transforms BPMN-based workflows into LittleHorse. That's a good idea. Do you have a use-case in mind?

[samarpan-b]

We have tons of production applications where we run and execute BPMNs for dynamic business workflows. In many places, we have end users defining their own BPMNs and executing them through the application. We use Camunda to execute all of these BPMNs as it was open-source and free to use. But now Camunda has gone all paid with its enterprise version and many of our customers are now suffering from a challenge to pay for camunda or move to other BPMN execution engines. We are looking for a production grade drop-in replacement for camunda which is open source and free to use. If you can build an adapter, that will be great. We are happy to contribute as well if required if its not too big a change.

[coltmcnealy-lh]

Thanks for the info! @eduwercamacaro what do you think about having a BPMN adapter? I think the WfSpec supports most of the BPMN functionality. We don't have any BPMN experts, maybe you could help contribute @samarpan-b ?

This would probably need a formal proposal including the API, etc. Would it live in lhctl? A separate repository? A plugin to the sdk-java? Not sure.

[eduwercamacaro]

Thanks @samarpan-b this is very helpful.

I love the idea to support BPMN on top of LittleHorse. I don't think we need to expand the support of the sdk-java for this, but rather create a separate gradle project that either talks to lh server directly or uses the classes provided by sdk-java. I agree with Colt that a WfSpec already supports most of the BPMN functionality, so an adapter is very feasible.

I believe a new LittleHorse proposal is a good way to shape these ideas :)