Bonita components

Bonita is an open-source and extensible platform for business process automation and optimization. The Bonita platform accelerates development and production with clear separation between capabilities for visual programming and for coding. BPMN graphical notation, full extensibility, and reusable components allow smooth collaboration among the different profiles on the IT team, and with the business teams.

Moreover, Bonita integrates with existing information systems, orchestrates heterogeneous systems, and provides deep visibility into processes across the organization.

The Bonita platform has three main components:

  • the development environment, Bonita Studio,

  • the runtime environment, Bonita Runtime,

  • the tool to continuously deliver Bonita projects: Bonita Continuous Delivery (Subscription editions only).

Bonita Studio

Bonita Studio contains all the elements needed to design and build processes allowing entities of an organization to handle data in a standardized and traceable way.
Indeed, it is a graphical environment for creating processes and data models, to manage the organization of people that will do the tasks, and create the connectivity between Bonita and the IT environment it will orchestrate.

By default, users can use the Bonita User application to view and complete the process tasks for all processes.
But with Bonita, you can also build personalized process-based applications that will display customized views of the business data.
So, Bonita comes with an application designer and a UI designer to create those applications.

In summary, Bonita Studio contains three major design tools:

  • the whiteboard, for drawing a process flow diagram and defining the detail of steps, transitions, decision points and other process elements

  • several low-code development tools, to design data models, process-based applications, sandbox organizations …​

  • the UI Designer, used to create process forms, application pages and layouts

Bonita Studio is the development tool for both the Citizen developers and the Professional Developers.
Citizen developers (Business Analysts, Business Project Managers, Power Users) work in the Studio and the UI Designer to input business-level information to the project: application skeletons, processes, data model, and high-level user-interfaces.
As for the Professional developers, the back-end Java developers work in both the Studio and their favorite IDE, and the front-end developers work in the Studio, the UI Designer as well as their favorite IDE.

Related documentation pages

Bonita Studio Create process-based applications for business users

Bonita UI Designer Create the User Interfaces of you applications

Studio installation First step to use Bonita Studio

Bonita Studio also embeds a Bonita Runtime (Tomcat, Bonita provided applications, Bonita Engine, and an h2 database), suitable for testing an application that is in development. When you run a process from the Studio, it is automatically deployed onto the embedded Runtime (the development environment).

Then, once a process is ready, you can build it and deploy it on your Bonita qualification or production Runtime environment.
Bonita Continuous Delivery comes in very handy to help with this step throughout the project lifecycle.

Bonita Runtime

Bonita Runtime is composed of one or more Bonita Server nodes installed on some hosts (physical machine, virtual machine, a cloud instance, a container like Docker, …​). A Bonita Runtime composed of multiple nodes constitutes a cluster.

Bonita provided applications are embedded in the Bonita Runtime.

As mentioned before, the Bonita User Application is the part of Bonita that is visible to process users, who use it to view tasks and take actions thanks to a generic task list for all processes they are involved in.

Bonita also comes with three other very useful applications:

  • Bonita Administrator Application: the tool used by the administrator to install, deploy and manage processes, monitor process execution, [perform some evolutions in organization, resources, and applications, and recover from errors.

  • Bonita Super Administrator Application: the tool used by the technical user to setup the Bonita Runtime environment with organization, Business Data Model, and applications. It is also the maintenance tool that allows to pause and resume the BPM Services to, for example, update the Business Data Model.

  • Application Directory Application, THE ONE URL to remember for all Bonita users, displaying the catalog of all applications accessible by the logged user.

Related documentation pages

Bonita Engine The tool to execute the processes, send and receive information to/from your IT environment

Install Bonita Runtime Install Bonita Engine and Bonita provided applications

Bonita User application An example of a todo list-based application provided by Bonita

Bonita Administrator application The Runtime administration user interface provided by Bonita

Bonita Continuous Delivery (BCD)

For Subscription editions only.
If your Bonita Subscription has been purchased before 2021, this Add-on can be purchased on top of your subscription. If you have purchased or renewed your Bonita Subscription in 2021 or after, BCD is fully part of your subscription.

To know more on this great tool, read the related documentation section.