Behind-the-scenes with the Flowable Product Team | Q2/2024

Welcome to all Flowable enthusiasts! We are thrilled to give you an exclusive glimpse into what we're working on and what we're buzzing about. So, what do we have in store for you? Let’s find out:

AI in Flowable

At Flowable we've been closely monitoring AI developments, experimenting, building prototypes, and sharing our insights with you. In the past few months, this has culminated in a clear understanding of where it makes sense to integrate with it, and – perhaps more importantly – where it doesn’t make sense. Read more about it or watch our latest webinar "Smart modeling: Leveraging AI assistance for process modeling".

FlowFest’24

We are currently preparing for FlowFest’24. This year the tech stream and innovation stream, led by the product team, will again deep dive into different aspects of Flowable, such as our outstanding integration capabilities, intelligent document processing, AI, and much more. Register here.

Microsoft SQL server performance improvements  

In the upcoming open source and enterprise releases, we’ve significantly improved performance when using Microsoft's SQL Server. After noticing performance issues under high load in complex, large-scale orchestrations, we delved deeper and had a breakthrough when a long-time customer highlighted a potential issue with the storage type of text columns.

What now follows is a deep technical explanation, not for the faint of heart ;-)  

For text columns in MSSQL, a choice can be made between the ‘varchar’ and ‘nvarchar’ column types. The nvarchar column type supports full unicode text. The varchar column type has limited support for different characters but needs less storage on a database level.  

When executing queries against MSSQL, the query parameter must have the correct text type, or else the query planner might opt for not using an index. For historical reasons, MSSQL runs with a parameter ‘sendStringParametersAsUnicode’ set to true, which means that always an implicit conversion of varchar parameter types to ‘nvarchar’ is performed. This is great for backward compatibility, but it can confuse the query planner. 

We found that setting sendStringParametersAsUnicode to false and making sure that the query parameter is always correctly set, makes sure that indexes are always hit, and queries are executed efficiently. This meant a major overhaul of Flowable’s low-level database layer – of which the foundation is already over a decade old.

Note that all these changes only have an impact on MSSQL Server database users and not on other supported databases like Postgres, Oracle, and DB2. If you are interested in the full details, then have a look at our GitHub repository.

These changes will be applied to both Flowable Open Source and the Flowable Platform, ensuring improved execution times for all users.

Release 3.16.0

There's a new Flowable release coming in the upcoming weeks. We will have a quick look at the new high-level features you can expect from this release.

With 3.16.0, Flowable is introducing a new concept in the modeling tool called plugins. A plugin is similar to an app, but it’s targeted at Modelers that want to create Design artefacts that can be shared with other Design instances within your organization or even to other organizations. In this version it’s supported to create a plugin task that references a service model and can be preconfigured on how the task should appear in the CMMN and/or BPMN editor palette. For example, you can customize the icon, name and its properties. For a service model the input, output and error mappings are one of the main parts. In the plugin task editor, you are able to define how the input mapping properties will appear in the property panel in the editor. You can choose if the mapping properties should appear as task properties directly, or if you want to keep using the regular input mapping dialog. Additionally, you can also define if the task should be asynchronous or if this property should still appear in the property panel, and which border and background color the task should have.

After having modeled such a plugin task, it can be exported and installed in a Flowable Design instance and then linked to a workspace where you would like the use the plugin task. After these steps the new task will become available in the CMMN and/or BPMN editor depending on how you configured it.

In addition to the new plugin concept, there are lots of other features and bug fixes, including WCAG 2.1 AA compliance for Flowable Work, improved navigation in Flowable Design, new form components with Master/Detail, Query data table and vertical tab support, improve case and process instance migration, model diffing and versioning support, and a new app dashboard view in Flowable Design and much more.

At Flowable, our fantastic team is the driving force behind our success. In each newsletter, we'll introduce you to one of our product team members. This time, meet Yvo Swillens, our Product Cloud Architect. As part of the team that founded Flowable, Yvo has been with us since day one and has been rocking with us for over six years.

What do you like most about working at Flowable?

There are many things I like about working at Flowable, but two stand out the most:

First, my job is incredibly hands-on. In larger companies, being an Architect often means spending a lot of time drawing diagrams and doing abstract work. While I do those things here too, I also get to dive into the nitty-gritty and work directly on the product itself. This hands-on experience is what I truly enjoy.

Second, nothing is set in stone. There's always room to present and explore new ideas and improvements that might not be on the roadmap yet. This flexibility means I can actively contribute to shaping the product, making it an exciting and dynamic environment to work in.

What have you been working on the past couple of months?

In the last couple of months, I focused on developing a shared SaaS environment for customers. This project builds on the foundation we established with our cloud trial environment, which allowed customers to test out our product and helped us identify best practices for setting up Flowable.

Now, we're taking it a step further to enhance reliability, security, and overall performance. This upgrade aims to provide our customers with a seamless and secure experience while using Flowable in a cloud-based setting.

What is your favorite Flowable feature?

There are so many features I find impressive at Flowable, but the Flowable Inspect runtime debugging tool always stands out to me. It allows developers to quickly analyze and gain deep insights into the runtime system, making problem-solving and debugging so much more efficient.

Being born and raised in the Netherlands, is there a favorite food you would recommend to someone visiting?

One dish I always recommend is Patatje Oorlog. It's not healthy at all, but it’s incredibly delicious! The name translates to "war fries". It is essentially fries topped with ketchup, mayo, chopped onions, and a savory Indonesian peanut sauce. It's a must-try when you're in the Netherlands!

What excites you the most about traveling?

Food is definitely on top of the list. I believe food is one of the most authentic cultural experiences you can have. When I travel, I seek out the most traditional neighborhoods to explore their cuisine. These days, many countries are so multicultural that you can find foods that, while not historically from that region, have become part of its culinary tradition. I especially like street food, which to me offers the most genuine taste and experience of local culture.

Stay tuned for our next edition, where we'll unveil even more exciting developments from the Flowable Product Team. If you have questions or want to take the discussion further, meet us in the Forum.