WorkFlow-Engine is a Java, GPL-3.0 licensed workflow engine built on Spring Boot and Vue that gives Chinese agencies and enterprises visual form design, graphical process design and item management, and is aimed at teams that must digitise internal approval flows and drive third-party business interfaces on their own infrastructure.

What it is

WorkFlow-Engine is a domestic (信创) workflow engine with a separated Spring Boot and Vue front end, built on Flowable 6.8.0. It combines three cooperating parts: a form designer for visual form creation, a process designer for graphical BPMN modelling and instance monitoring, and an item management module (事项管理) that configures how each process node behaves. The back end runs on Spring Boot 2.7.10 with SpringDataJPA, SpringDataRedis, SpringKafka and Nacos 2.2.1, and the front end on Vue 3.3.2, Vite 2 and Element Plus.

The problem it solves is assembly work. Flowable 6.8.0 is a raw BPMN engine; WorkFlow-Engine supplies the layer above it that most teams would otherwise build by hand. The form designer maps form structures onto database table designs through drag-and-drop, the process designer handles node permissions, transition conditions, suspend, activate and delete on running instances, and item management supplies node-level approval rules, opinion boxes, attachment settings and numbering rules. Teams that would otherwise wire a bare Flowable engine to a hand-written administrative interface get a configured front end instead.

Key capabilities

• Form designer with drag-and-drop layout, data source binding, field validation rules, custom styles, and support for arrays and tables as complex data structures, plus standardised template import.
• Process designer covering start events, approval nodes and end events, node permissions, transition conditions, process simulation, and seamless migration of low-version process instances to higher versions.
• Item management (事项管理) configures per-node form style, approval rules, opinion box, attachment settings and numbering rules, and collects all to-dos into one screen filterable by 岗位 (post).
• Interface configuration attaches third-party interfaces to process nodes and process paths; link configuration binds third-party application entries to posts.
• Body templates, red-header templates (正文模板, 套红模板) and print templates can be imported and managed, though body and red-header templates require third-party plugins.
• Source modules: y9-module-processadmin, y9-module-itemadmin, y9-module-flowableui and y9-module-jodconverter for preview; front ends y9vue-itemAdmin and y9vue-flowableUI.
• Deployment supports microservice, distributed and containerised topologies; three granted patents cover全域状态更新的工作流同步更新, 工作流数据恢复, and 多起点多分支流程引擎实现.

Who uses it and how

• Government units and agencies digitising internal process management rules and internal business flows, with configuration handled by operations staff in 事项配置 and daily work in the workbench.
• Organisations running on 信创 stacks: compatible with 统信, 麒麟 and 中科方德 operating systems, 人大金仓, 达梦 and 高斯 databases, 东方通, 金蝶 and 宝兰德 middleware, and 奇安信, 火狐, 谷歌 and 360 browsers.
• Small single-node deployments: the monolith handles 500 users on a 4-core, 8GB virtual machine in a 信创 environment, with historical data carried over by year.
• Larger or distributed installations scaling outward through microservices and containers, driving external business, algorithm, interface and proxy integrations.
• Any deployment must connect to a digital base (数字底座) for post and role configuration plus its single sign-on service, without which the engine will not run.

Getting started

No published artifact or installation command appears in the README; it points to the source tree, where the back end is built from the y9-module-* Maven modules and the front end from y9vue-itemAdmin and y9vue-flowableUI. An online demo (在线体验) is linked from the project homepage at risesoft.net.

How it compares

Flowable 6.8.0 is the engine underneath rather than a competitor: WorkFlow-Engine wraps that BPMN core with form, process and item administration tooling. Teams already comfortable with a plain Flowable deployment and their own front end gain little from the additional modules.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must operate MySQL 5.7/8.0+, Redis 6.2+, Elasticsearch 7.9+, Kafka 2.6+, Nacos 2.2.1 and filezilla server 1.7+, plus a separate file preview server, the digital base and its single sign-on service, and third-party plugins for body and red-header templates. Teams that cannot supply that digital base should not pick it, and projects needing permissive licensing should weigh GPL-3.0 carefully. The README is Chinese-only and gives no installation command, so expect to read the source tree rather than a deployment guide.

y9-module-flowableui -- 工作流程模块
 ├── risenet-y9boot-webapp-flowableui -- 工作流程webapp
y9-module-itemadmin -- 事项管理模块
 ├── risenet-y9boot-api-feignclient-itemadmin -- 事项管理接口客户端封装
 ├── risenet-y9boot-api-interface-itemadmin -- 事项管理接口
 ├── risenet-y9boot-support-itemadmin-jpa-repository -- 事项管理持久层
 ├── risenet-y9boot-support-itemadmin -- 事项管理控制层、业务层
 ├── risenet-y9boot-webapp-itemadmin -- 事项管理webapp
y9-module-jodconverter -- 预览模块
 ├── risenet-y9boot-webapp-jodconverter -- 预览webapp
y9-module-processadmin -- 流程管理模块
 ├── risenet-y9boot-api-feignclient-processadmin -- 流程管理接口客户端封装
 ├── risenet-y9boot-api-interface-processadmin -- 流程管理接口
 ├── risenet-y9boot-support-processadmin -- 流程管理业务层
 ├── risenet-y9boot-webapp-processadmin -- 流程管理webapp
vue -- 前端工程
 ├── y9vue-itemAdmin  -- 事项管理前端工程
 ├── y9vue-flowableUI -- 工作流程前端工程