Oryx Editor

Oryx is a web-based editor for modeling business processes in various modeling languages like BPMN or EPC. You can create models and share them with your business partners, clients and friends. You may not only share a model with your colleagues, but discuss and improve it within one working environment. Thus, Oryx brings all the advantages of Web 2.0 into the world of modeling. To start modeling you need zero installation–your model is just one click away.

Oryx is an open platform for developments regarding business process modeling. Everyone is invited to contribute new process modeling languages, features and knowledge to Oryx. The number of contributors is growing rapidly and the developers come from all over the world. The project is published under MIT License.

A prominent tool that built on top of Oryx is the Signavio Process Editor, a professional BPMN designer and Business Process Analysis (BPA) tool.

This page is the drop-in center for all contributors of the project as well as those who want to deploy Oryx on their own server or integrate it into their own projects. In the wiki and downloads sections you find various documentation for developers.

Oryx is a project of the Business Process Technology research group at the Hasso Plattner Institute of IT Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam. The research group is led by Professor Mathias Weske, as is the Oryx project.

Oryx in a Nutshell

• A powerful tool for graphical process modeling
• Oryx runs in your web browser, zero software installation required
• Oryx is a process platform - stakeholders can access process models via the web
• Based on web technology, integration in wikis and your corporate IT is simplified
• Oryx creates transparency and acceptance
• Oryx is extensible - new functions can be added via a plugin mechanism
• Oryx directly supports BPMN, EPC, and other process modeling languages
• Oryx is based on open internet standards
• User authentication through OpenID

Facts for Developers

• Easy, declarative definition of new process modeling languages (we call them stencil sets)
• Easy extension of the editor's functionality via a plugin mechanism (small core, almost all features are implemented as plugins)
• The rendering technology used is SVG and XHTML
• Client-side code is written in Javascript, server-side code is written in Java
• Support of I18N

Oryx maintenance has been discontinued

The main developers behind the Oryx project have founded Signavio in May 2009. Signavio offers a commercial SaaS platform for business process modeling as well as a free BPMN editor for academic use.

As the manpower of Hasso-Plattner-Institute has faded significantly over the past years, maintenance of the Oryx code is no longer guaranteed. Therefore, companies thinking about integrating a BPMN modeler into their own product are highly encouraged to rather go for OEM integrations with the Signavio code base.