Chapter 1, Installing Activiti, discusses Activiti's core concepts and terminologies. It also provides an environment setup for Activiti BPM. By the end of this chapter, you will be familiar with the installation of Activiti and the deployment of Activiti Explorer with the Apache Tomcat server. At the end of this chapter, you will learn how to create a simple process in Activiti and perform the unit testing of processes.

Chapter 2, Modeling Using the Activiti Modeler, helps you design a business process using Activiti Modeler. You will also learn how to import and export models in Activiti Modeler. At the end of this chapter, you will be aware of BPM standards and BPMN elements, and be able to model your business process in Modeler.

Chapter 3, Designing Your Process Using the Activiti Designer, introduces us to the Activiti Designer. You will learn to integrate Activiti Designer with Eclipse, design a process, and test it using Designer.

Chapter 4, Management and Monitoring Using the Activiti Explorer, helps you understand the various functionalities of Activiti Explorer. You will learn to manage various tasks, processes, and users. You will also learn to generate reports in Explorer. At the end of this chapter, you will be able to deploy processes in Activiti Explorer and perform various functionalities, such as starting a process instance, monitoring a business process, and completing a task.

Chapter 5, Development Using the Process Engine, describes an Activiti development environment. You will learn about the different types of layers in the Activiti engine. At the end of the chapter, you will be able to change the default database of Activiti.

Chapter 6, The Activiti ProcessEngine API, explains the different APIs and services of Activiti. It demonstrates how you can start process instances and deploy processes managing user tasks using different APIs and services, such as process engine, runtime, management, and history. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to perform unit testing and debugging for a process.

Chapter 7, Working with the REST API, gives an overview of the Activiti REST API. In Activiti, you can use the REST API for managing processes, users, and tasks. You will learn how to implement the REST service in Activiti.

Chapter 8, Integrating Activiti with Third-party Services, will teach you about the integration of Activiti with various portals. You will be able to perform integration with Liferay, Drools, and OSGi. You will also learn how to configure Activiti with Apache Karaf.

Chapter 9, Implementing Advanced Workflows, explains Sub-Processes, multi-instance processes, and parallel gateways. You will learn about process modeling with execution and task listeners. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to implement event and task listeners in your business processes.

You will need the following software to be installed before running the code examples:

This book is primarily intended for Business Analysts (BAs), developers, and project managers who need to develop a process model for implementation in a BPM system. The book assumes that you have basic knowledge of business analysis and Java; however, knowledge of Activiti is not required.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The Wars directory contains activiti-explorer.war and activiti-rest.war."

To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:

Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:

public class ListTaskDemo {
public static void main(String ar[])
  {
  ProcessEngineprocessEngine = ProcessEngineConfiguration
      .createStandaloneProcessEngineConfiguration()
      .setJdbcDriver("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver")
      .setJdbcUrl("jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/activiti_book")
      .setJdbcPassword("root").setJdbcUsername("root")
      .buildProcessEngine();
  TaskServicetaskService = processEngine.getTaskService();

List<Task> tasks = taskService.createTaskQuery().taskCandidateGroup("engineering").list();

  for(Task task : tasks)
{
System.out.println("Task available for Engineering group: " + task.getName());
}   
  }
}

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