Flowable JFS2020: Modern Could-Based Process Architectures

This repository includes everything for the talk Modern Cloud-Based Process Architecture. The default mode is to use the Flowable Trial, or another Enterprise installation if available. In theory it's possible to use Flowable OSS as well. For the OSS usage there is a work in progress branch in this repository.

Enterprise Trial Setup

1. The enterprise product is not part of this repository. However, you can use this repository with the free trial. Therefore, you need to download the free trial from the flowable.com website. You will receive an email with a license file, and an archive to download.

2. Copy the license file to enterprise-trial/license/. Ensure the license file is named flowable.license.

3. Download the zip file linked in the trial email. Extract the zip file and navigate to the folder flowable/tomcat/webapps. Copy the three files from this folder and place them in enterprise-trial/webapps/.

   Executing find enterprise-trial should now have the following output:

   $ find enterprise-trial
   enterprise-trial
   enterprise-trial/webapps
   enterprise-trial/webapps/.gitkeep
   enterprise-trial/webapps/flowable-design.war
   enterprise-trial/webapps/flowable-control.war
   enterprise-trial/webapps/flowable-engage.war
   enterprise-trial/license
   enterprise-trial/license/.gitkeep
   enterprise-trial/license/flowable.license
   enterprise-trial/.gitignore
   

4. You are now ready to startup your applications. Flowable, Kafka, ActiveMQ, Elasticsearch can be started through docker compose. Simply execute:

   docker-compose -f docker-compose-enterprise.yml up
   

   Hint: It's normally more performant to run the application outside of docker. To simplify the setup all applications are bundled into one single docker-compose file.

5. Wait until all apps started and open http://localhost:8888/ in your browser. This is the URL for Flowable Design. You can login with the username admin and the password test.

6. Once you logged in, you can import the app into Flowable Design. Therefore, click the large + button:

   On the dialog select then the green "Import an app from a file" button:

   Now drag and drop or select the Digital_Fitness_Center-Enterprise.zip file from the apps/ folder. The upload will take a few seconds until you see the imported application:

   You can now press the publish button in the top menu.

7. Once you published the app, the Flowable Engine is waiting for Events. You can go to the Flowable Engage application which is handling the case execution. After login with the username admin and the password test you can select in the menu Work and then Open. Here you are going to see your members once you triggered the first case. For trigger the event, please continue with the setup described in the next section.

Setup and Trigger Event with Serverless Application

Precondition: You should have the Maven packages from Flowable Serverless installed on your machine.

First, you can just compile the and run the source code in flowable-serverless with Maven. When running the application, you need to provide two parameters. The first parameter is the member id, the second parameter is the gate.

However, the application is intended to run with GraalVM graalvm-ce-java8-20.2.0. Once you downloaded GraalVM you need to install the CLI for native-image. Therefore, you can use the gu CLI which is included inside the GraalVM package: gu install native-image. Double check that native-image is in your path. When you are using Mac OS X you might need to run the following command in your shell:

export PATH=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/graalvm-ce-java8-20.2.0/Contents/Home/bin:$PATH

Now change into the flowable-serverless directory and execute the ./build-graal-image.sh script:

cd flowable-serverless
./build-graal-image.sh

Once the image is build, you can execute it:

./flowableserverless 42 Gate1

Note: To start this application it might be necessary to add kafka as localhost to your /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1	localhost kafka

The reason is that kafka is configured to listen to the hostname kafka instead of localhost, since that's the name which is used internally in the docker network.

Start Door Application

Lastly, only the door application is missing. This application is optional. However, it's a great tool to see the events triggered and visualizing them. You can simply execute in another terminal:

mvn -pl door-application spring-boot:run

The frontend is a separate Angular application. To run the Angular app you need to have Node installed on your machine. Once node is installed simply execute in a terminal:

cd door-application-ui
npm install
npm run start

Go to localhost:4200 to access the Door Application dashboard.