Bonita is an open-source business process and workflow management platform created by the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science. It is available as a free community edition or as a commercial subscription product.
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WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
Score 7.1 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
WSO2 says they have taken a fresh look at old-style,
centralized ESB architectures, and designed their unique WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
from the ground up as the highest performance, lowest footprint, and most
interoperable service oriented architecture (SOA) and integration middleware
today. Additionally, the vendor says that by relying on their carbon technology
the ESB is able to deliver a smooth start-to-finish project experience.
Well suited for low code/no code applications centered around approval flows. It has built-in task management for users to see their pending actions, comments, statuses, etc. It has a very nice design for process flows. Less appropriate may be for generic type applications with complex screens and logic within those screens that need a lot of data to process.
WSO2 ESB is an awesome product for companies looking to venture into the world of SOA with an ESB. They have a lot of other products too that can work really well with their carbon infrastructure. The interface is simple for deploying and managing proxy services. You can also write custom modules within the ESB using Java with IDE like Eclipse
Bonita seems particularly suited for processes requiring a great deal of human interaction. Its user model allows you to control access to business processes in a fine-grained way. This allows for business processes to move smoothly between users and services as the process advances.
The definition and usage of custom forms from the latest version of Bonita seems particularly powerful. It allows for a thorough customization of the look-and-feel and does not require complex developments.
The web interface and administration section have greatly improved in the latest versions. Installation and configuration of processes has become more flexible and more structured. The administration section gives a good view on failed processes, allowing to analyse problems in an efficient way.
One of the basic requirement of an ESB product is that it should be able to support transformation. WSO2 ESB provides support of XSLT, so you can transform your request to whatever format. Moreover, transformations like converting your xml payload into JSON and JSON payload to XML are out of the box available.
WSO2 ESB provides a scheduler feature, by which you can configure your own scheduler to call a proxy service at a particular time of day or or initiate sequence.
WSO2 ESB provides excellent error handling techniques, WSO2 ESB provides detailed error handling scenarios to tackle all the situations. WSO2 ESB also provides custom error handling by which you can make your own custom error message before sending it back to client.
There is a learning curve beyond the boot camps that needs to be addressed with more structured curriculum.
The full stack technologies are industry standard, but these [are] challenging to learn and could use a learning path and orientation. There's probably opportunity for third-parties here to help with learning and adoption.
Bonita Platform has allowed us to develop GUI relatively fast using its UI Designer while being able to seamlessly integrate our business logic in Java in a BPMN2 process diagram. It gives a nice productivity boost but still requires programming know-how to be able to deliver the final solution to your business problems.
Lack of auto-restart built-in capabilities. In case of running out of memory there are no built-in methods to recover from a crash, just for example, Oracle WebLogic Node Manager.
Engine itself is efficient enough for most cases I dealt with. It can also be extended by clustering. I have done performance tests with JMeter and only managed to induce the crash of... JMeter. If there are efficiency issues they usually concern bad design/implementation of created apps or bottlenecks in integrated systems. Although I have met two cases with efficiency loss.
1. Java 7 related PermGen saturation caused by big number of installed apps (there is no jar dependency reusal between apps option).
2. Big number of waiting event handlers in processes stresses the database.
Respect of BPMN standard over the long term. Good enhancements by Bonitasoft for new use cases, for example the introduction of a real form editor even if it has been technically difficult to manage. Once done though, we have far greater possibility of human interaction.