1 Introduction
1.1. Agreement
Flowable is released under the Apache V2 license.
1.2. Download
http://www.flowable.org/downloads.html
1.3. Source code
The Flowable distribution contains most of the source code, provided as a JAR file. The source code of Flowable can also be obtained through the following link: https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine
1.4. IDE
1.4.1. JDK 8+
Running Flowable requires JDK 8 or above. You can visit the Oracle Java SE downloads page and click the "Download JDK" button to get it. There are also installation instructions on this page. After the installation is complete, you can execute java -version. If you can see the version information of JDK, it means that the installation is successful.
1.4.2. IDE
You can choose your own IDE for Flowable development. If you want to use Flowable Designer, you need Eclipse Mars or Neon. Go to the Eclipse download page to select the Eclipse version and download it. Unzip the downloaded file, and then execute the eclipse file under the eclipse folder. There is a special chapter in the follow-up of the manual to introduce how to install our Eclipse Designer plug-in.
1.5 What is Flowable?
Flowable is a lightweight business process engine written in Java. The Flowable process engine can be used to deploy BPMN 2.0 process definitions (the industry XML standard for defining processes), create process instances of these process definitions, perform queries, access running or historical process instances and related data, and more. This chapter will introduce the various concepts and APIs step by step with an example that you can use in your own development environment.
Flowable can be added to your application/service/architecture very flexibly. The Flowable library released in the form of JAR can be added to the application or service to embed the engine. Publishing as a JAR allows Flowable to be easily incorporated into any Java environment: Java SE; servlet containers such as Tomcat, Jetty or Spring; Java EE servers such as JBoss or WebSphere, etc. Alternatively, HTTP calls can be made using the Flowable REST API. There are also a number of Flowable applications (Flowable Modeler, Flowable Admin, Flowable IDM and Flowable Task) that provide ready-to-use UI examples that work with processes and tasks.
Common to all methods that use Flowable is the core engine. The core engine is a collection of services and provides an API to manage and execute business processes. The following tutorials begin with an introduction to setting up and using the core engine. Subsequent chapters build on the knowledge acquired in the previous chapters.
The first section shows the way to run Flowable in the simplest possible way: using only Java SE's standard Java main method. Many core concepts and APIs will also be introduced here.
The Flowable REST API chapter shows how to run and use the same API via REST.
The Flowable APP chapter will introduce the basic methods of the out-of-the-box Flowable UI example.
1.6 Flowable and Activiti
Flowable is a fork of Activiti (registered trademark held by Alfresco). In the following chapters, you will notice that package names, configuration files, etc., all use flowable.