Activiti lack of native rule engine support

Question

I'm doing some comparisons and a presentation tomorrow with different BPMS systems and I was reading about the difference between jbPM (the source engine that was used to build Activiti) and the Activiti engine. Can someone tell what is the caution of jBpm having the native built-in business Rules engine where Activiti has no native rule engine support but supports a basic integration with Drools to support the business Rule Task?

This is a real important question for me so a quick response to this would be great.

Thanks

Answer 1

Well, a couple of clarifications about your statements: jBPM 5 and 6 are not related with Activiti at all. They are completely different engines. Drools and jBPM 5/6 were built together to work from the ground up. This allows you to go one step further when you model your business assets. If you are only looking at business processes, then jBPM and Activiti do provide similar features. But the case is that most of the time, after implementing your first of processes you realise that you need more flexibility and Rules (a Rule Engine) becomes a must in your infrastructure. So it obviously depends on what you are looking for to do with the Engine(s). HTH

PS: by the way I've written this blog post very long time ago, but it still applies: http://salaboy.com/2011/01/19/jbpm5-vs-activiti5-dumb-question/