While Camunda BPM is a Java platform, process data is not always represented by Java objects. When interacting with external systems, serialized formats such as JSON or XML are often used. While such process variables can be treated by the engine as plain String objects, there is a significant effort required to process such data like parsing, manipulating or mapping from/to Java objects. Thus, Camunda BPM offers an optional component that eases the work with this kind of data in the process engine.

As an introductory example, assume a process instance that retrieves a customer’s profile by invoking a RESTful XML web service and that stores the result in a variable called . Let the variable have the following content:

Camunda Spin provides the following engine functionality:

• Integration of the Spin API functions into the expression language
• Native JSON and XML variable value types