Usage without Camunda Platform

Use case

In seldom cases you may want to use the camunda-bpm-data library without Camunda BPM Engine. The most frequent case for this is if you provide a third-party library that is used with or without the engine. In particular, there is no way to use functionality relying on the Camunda engine without it, but there is some functionality working on simple Map<String, Object> or VariableMap (from a separate small library org.camunda.commons:camunda-commons-typed-values) which is still usable WITHOUT having the entire Camunda BPM Engine on the class path.

Limitations

Due to limitations provided by the JVM, usage of CamundaBpmData convenience methods is NOT POSSIBLE if the parts of the Java Camunda API is not on the classpath (RuntimeService, TaskService, LockedExternalTask, ...).

Default solution

The default solution for this problem would be to put the org.camunda.bpm:camunda-engine Camunda BPM Engine JAR on the classpath, but don't initialize the Camunda BPM Engine.

Alternative solution

In order to make the JAR footprint lighter, we created a special artifact, which provides the Camunda BPM API only (API classes only but no implementation). This artifact includes ORIGINAL Camunda BPM classes of the API.

In the same time, we started a discussion with Camunda Team to provide a dedicated API JAR of the engine. We will produce the Camunda BPM API for the upcoming releases. Instead of using the original engine JAR, you might want to put the following artifact on your classpath:

<dependency>
      <groupId>io.holunda.camunda-api</groupId>
      <artifactId>camunda-bpm-engine-api</artifactId>
      <version>${camunda.version}</version>
</dependency>

For more information about the Camunda BPM API, please check its GitHub project page: https://github.com/holunda-io/camunda-bpm-api/