Writing this book was a life-changer for me. After I wrote Open Source ESBs in Action for Manning a few years ago, I focused on my daily job for some time, working with open source enterprise integration frameworks like Mule, Camel, ServiceMix, and Spring Integration. My work, over time, drove me to designing and developing processes and BPM, and I started using jBPM and WebSphere Process Server. Then I learned that the founder of the jBPM project, Tom Baeyens, was leaving JBoss to work on a new open source project, which was in stealth mode at that time (early 2010). When the first alpha version of Activiti was released, I told myself I had to contribute to that project, one way or another.

A piece that was missing in the first stages of the Activiti project was an Eclipse plug-in. I had some email conversations with Tom about contributing the plug-in to Activiti. We met and he told me that his goal was to disrupt the process engine space with the Activiti project. My enthusiasm grew even more and I offered my time to start working on a first version of the Activiti Designer. Together with my former colleagues, Tiese Barrell, Yvo Swillens, and Ron van Liempd, we were able to deliver a first version within a couple of months.

As we became part of the Activiti developer community, my hands were itching to start writing a book about Activiti. I felt that a great open source process engine would need a detailed book to describe all the possibilities and potential it offers. Manning was eager to publish a book about Activiti, and, together with Ron, we started writing in the autumn of 2010. We had a hard time keeping up with the frequent releases and the new functionality that kept on coming. But, it also was a lot of fun to be able to write about a new functionality that was just (or about to be) released.