Introducing Operaton Examples

2026-06-17 – The Operaton Team

Learning by Example: Introducing the Operaton Examples repository

We are happy to announce Operaton Examples - a curated catalog of minimal, production-quality example projects for the Operaton BPMN engine. Whether you are just getting started with process automation or exploring advanced engine features, Operaton Examples gives you a clean, working foundation to build from.

The repository is available now at github.com/operaton/operaton-examples.

What Makes These Examples Different

Every example in the catalog is built to a consistent quality bar:

• Dual build systems — each project builds with both Maven Wrapper and Gradle Wrapper out of the box.
• Testcontainers integration tests — building an example means testing it against a real PostgreSQL database and, where applicable, real external systems. There are no mocked containers pretending to be the real thing.
• Docker Compose for local exploration — spin up the full stack with a single command and explore the process in Cockpit and Tasklist.

  cd examples/getting-started
  docker compose up -d --wait   # start PostgreSQL
  ./mvnw spring-boot:run        # or: ./gradlew bootRun
  # Cockpit/Tasklist: http://localhost:8080  (demo/demo)
  ./mvnw verify                 # runs Testcontainers ITs

What’s in the Catalog

The catalog is organized into four areas:

Core Examples cover the everyday building blocks of BPMN development: service tasks, user tasks and forms, DMN decision tables, message and timer events, error compensation (the saga pattern), multi-instance activities, external-task workers, and REST/mail/Kafka integrations — 17 examples in total currently.

Advanced Engine Features go deeper: custom engine plugins with parse listeners, CommandInterceptor for cross-cutting concerns, process migration between definition versions, multi-tenancy with tenant identifiers, and the BPMN Model API for both reading and generating process models programmatically.

Platform Integration examples demonstrate running Operaton outside of Spring Boot — embedded in Quarkus/CDI, or as a process-application WAR deployed into the shared operaton/tomcat or operaton/wildfly distribution images.

Use Cases are end-to-end scenario examples that combine multiple features into realistic workflows: an employee leave-request process with timer escalation, a loan-application process using DMN risk assessment and Spring Mail, an IT incident-management process with signal and timer boundary events, and an order-fulfillment process with error boundaries, async continuation, and compensation.

Why This Matters for the Community

One of the most common questions from teams evaluating Operaton — or migrating from Camunda 7 CE — is: “Where do I start?” Until now, the answer required assembling pieces from documentation, blog posts, and older community examples that may not reflect the current API.

operaton-examples closes that gap. Every example is verified against the current release (2.1.1) and maintained as part of the project’s CI pipeline, so they stay current as Operaton evolves.

Get Started

• Repository: https://github.com/operaton/operaton-examples
• Operaton docs: docs.operaton.org (https://docs.operaton.org/)
• Downloads: https://operaton.org/download
• Forum: https://forum.operaton.org

The Operaton Team