Bonita Open Solution is an open-source BPM

Business process management

Business process management is a holistic management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. BPM attempts to...

 and Workflow

Workflow

A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work...

 suite, created in 2001.

It was started in French National Institute for Research in Computer Science, and then had incubated several years inside of the French computer science company Bull

Groupe Bull

-External links:* * — Friends, co-workers and former employees of Bull and Honeywell* *...

. Since 2009, the development of Bonita is supported by a company dedicated to this activity: BonitaSoft.

Features

Bonita is made of 3 major components :

• Bonita Studio: allows the user to graphically modify business processes following the BPMN standard. The user can also connect processes to other pieces of the Information System
  Information system
  An information system - or application landscape - is any combination of information technology and people's activities that support operations, management, and decision making. In a very broad sense, the term information system is frequently used to refer to the interaction between people,...
  
   (such as messaging, ERP
  Enterprise resource planning
  Enterprise resource planning systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application...
  
  , ECM
  Enterprise content management
  Enterprise Content Management is a formalized means of organizing and storing an organization's documents, and other content, that relate to the organization's processes...
  
  , databases...) in order to generate an autonomous business application accessible as a web form. Bonita Studio also allows the user to design graphically the forms
  Form (web)
  A webform on a web page allows a user to enter data that is sent to a server for processing. Webforms resemble paper or database forms because internet users fill out the forms using checkboxes, radio buttons, or text fields...
  
   that will be shown to the end user in order to interact with the process. Moreover, the Studio allows the user to get started with processes designed with other standards and technologies such as XPDL
  XPDL
  The XML Process Definition Language is a format standardized by the Workflow Management Coalition to interchange business process definitions between different workflow products, i.e...
  
   or jBPM
  JBPM
  jBPM is an open-source workflow engine written in Java that can execute business processes described in BPMN 2.0 . It is released under the ASL by the JBoss community.In essence jBPM takes graphical process descriptions as input...
  
  . It relies on Eclipse
  Eclipse (software)
  Eclipse is a multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment and an extensible plug-in system...
  
  .
• Bonita BPM Engine: The BPM engine is a JAVA
  Java (programming language)
  Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
  
   API that allows you to interact programmatically with your processes.It is available under LGPL. It relies on Hibernate
  Hibernate (Java)
  Hibernate is an object-relational mapping library for the Java language, providing a framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database...
  
  
• Bonita User Experience: is a portal that allows each end-user to manage in a webmail-like interface all the tasks in which he or she is involved. The portal also allow the owner of a process to administrate and get reports about processes. It relies on GWT
  Google Web Toolkit
  Google Web Toolkit is an open source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain complex JavaScript front-end applications in Java. Other than a few native libraries, everything is Java source that can be built on any supported platform with the included GWT Ant build files...
  
  .

Bonita Open Solution is Open Source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 and can be downloaded under GPL.

Applications

Bonita can be applied for various projects requiring complex workflows like Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management

Supply chain management is the management of a network of interconnected businesses involved in the ultimate provision of product and service packages required by end customers...

, e-Government  etc.

What it is Used For

Bonita Open solution can be used for creating high-tech workflows and spreadsheets. Basically like an advance Excel and/or Apple Automator.

History and Releases

• 2001: First version of Bonita, at INRIA
• 2008: Bonita 4, at Bull
  Groupe Bull
  -External links:* * — Friends, co-workers and former employees of Bull and Honeywell* *...
  
  
• June 2009: Creation of BonitaSoft, the company supporting Bonita Open Solution.
• September 2009: BonitaSoft raises 3 millions dollers
• January 2010: Release of Bonita Open Solution, 5th version de Bonita.
• June 2010: Release of Bonita Open Solution 5.2
• October 2010: Lanzamiento de Bonita 5.2.4 (installer size, 219 MB; installed folder size, 331 MB)
• November 2010: Launched Bonita Open Solution 5.3
• 22-23 December, 2010: Bonita Open Solution 5.3.2 is released. BonitaSoft archieves 100 pay clients of its software BOS
• January 27, 2011, Bonita Open Solution 5.4 was released. , which offers key feature upgrades to achieve greater usability. Bonita Open Solution was downloaded more than half million times.
• May 27, 2011, Bonita Open Solution 5.5 was released. , which builds critical new features into BonitaSoft’s core offering that make developing, testing and managing BPM applications faster and easier.