Binaries for future versions
I spoke to a salesperson at Bonitasoft earlier in the week, who said that binaries would no longer be provided after version 2023.2 and that we would have to build the software ourselves from the source code from 2024.1 onwards. Can anyone confirm whether this is true please, as we may need to look for an alternative platform if it is?
(We're in the middle of setting up quite a small project using Bonitasoft Community, and although we do have developers with the knowledge to do this, I see there are a lot of different components that have to be built separately, so the time it takes them to do this every time we need to upgrade could well outweigh the benefits of the project.)
That's bad news.
It also seems to me that Bonita started hiding the community edition. On the web page you don't find the downloads anymore. When you follow the download link you find a form to enter lots of your data and to make an appointment with a sales person.
I am using Bonita in a university course. It's very useful for teaching process automation, and most students like it a lot. However, without any new developments in the community edition it won't be attractive in the long term.
And building the system from the sources is not an option.
Comments
Hi Thomas,
Yes, that's how I ended up speaking to the salesperson. I've since discovered that the binaries for older versions (up to 2023.2) are still available at https://github.com/bonitasoft/bonita-platform-releases/tags , but the binaries for 2024.1-b2 have been deleted. I think they were originally present, because they are linked to from the community blog post about 2024.1 beta, but the links are now broken.
I tried building 2024.3 beta from source earlier and it wasn't actually particularly difficult (just time-consuming as there are 11 different components, some of which take a long time to run). However, what's more concerning now is that the release notes say that the UI Designer will be phased out after an "extended period", and replaced by UI Builder, which is only available on paid subscriptions. I don't know how long the "extended period" will be, but presumably after that we will have to provide our own custom forms and won't be able to auto-generate them from Bonita Studio.
Chris
Yeah, I received an email that confirm what you said:
Starting from Bonita 2024.2 there will be no more Bonita Community and it will be called Bonita Open Source and since we will not get the binaries it seems that the only way is to build it from the source code.
Another thing that is concerning to me is that on their link Pricing Bonita Enterprise - Bonitasoft there is a comparative table that show an "X" on the Custom extensions for the Open Source edition... it seems that they are taking out the feature to create custom extensions like API and actor filters.
Haven't tried to build the new Bonita myself so I can't tell if its true.