Copyright © Jason Woodruff. Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/194/
I came across a BPM on-demand solution yesterday http://www.runmyprocess.com. This service is, I think, designed ‘restfully’ from the bottom-up. Certainly it seems oriented towards resources as the process component. I’m experimenting with the service and looking at how I can integrate hosted Live Forms (http://www.frevvo.com) with a hosted workflow. I don’t think this is likely to prove too difficult and a technical person would likely get this licked in seconds. I’ll post about any successes.
The service looks to be quite new: the v1.0 documentation was published last month and I’m the 5th person to register on the forum (but it is in French and that may be a disincentive!). They are promoting integration with well known SaaS apps like Salesforce, Zoho, 37 signals, and Google, and there are demos showing how to assemble processes to do this.
One thing I’d like the folks at runmyprocess to do is be a bit more explicit about the standards they are following and their architecture. But the service is using Restlet*. The process designer looks and feels like BPMN.
I think they need to make it easy to import and export processes. I don’t think there is any support for XPDL, but that might not be appropriate. Users need to stay because they want to not because they are locked-in!
I think this service is probably forging the future of BPM for the web. I expect we’ll see a growing ecosystem of rest-based business style services emerging. Good luck to runmyprocess (needs a shorthand?).
Runmyprocess is running a competition for projects with the prize of free hosting for a year.
* Awaiting publication of the Restlet book, expected publication date 28th May according to Amazon, but that seemingly hasn’t been met.
Tags: Restful BPM, runmyprocess
June 3, 2008 at 2:43 pm |
Hello Jason
Thanks for the very encouraging review. Let me complete it a little bit:
- the forum is not successful: 5 users as you mention, but we have more than 200 users. Actually we answer in French when questions are in French, and that may be a problem.
- I fully agree on the user lock-in risk and the need for export: only bad products bet on locking users in… so we try not to
Actually we’ve been allowing a full export of processes in XML from day 1, through the fact that the full atom description of any process can be opened in a browser (feed link on the process window). OK, that’s not very ergonomic, we’ll enhance it, but it’s fully functional. It’s not XPDL neither, but it’s more complete as it contains both the functional and technical part of the process (technical = for process execution); and anyhow XML formats are just one transform away one from the other.
- as you noticed we are working on the documentation, the architecture part of it is actually poor and especially the API part. All data can be provisioned and extracted through ReST API, that’s worth clarifying, indeed.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need support on your integration work with Frevvo, that’s surely interesting and I’m sure the Frevvo team (hello Ashish!) would be as interested as I am in getting feedback on that.
Best regards,
Matthieu
June 5, 2008 at 1:34 am |
Hi Jason,
I am not sure what level of integration you are considering for this experiment, but for the common case we already provide a variety of ways to connect (consume existing data and publish form data) frevvo forms to external data sources and to embed the form UI within an existing application. You may be familiar with most of these, but if not let us know.
Now, if you are looking for a deeper integration where not only the form is embedded within your application but also the whole designer, you can also use our new Atom based Data API. We already have some early access customers/partners using this new Data API to embed the form viewer and the form designer into their applications maintaining full control over the forms, applications, schemas, themes created.
Good luck and let us know how the integration is going. If you need any additional information or have any feedback dont hesitate to contact us. We surely will be in touch with Matthieu and the RunMyProcess team.
regards,
Yuri