---
title: "Technical Overview — Spiff Arena 0.1 documentation"
description: "Spiff Arena is a system that allows users to build and execute BPMN diagrams. It is composed of three applications, spiffworkflow-frontend , spiffworkflow-backend , and, optionally, a connector proxy ."
source_url: https://spiff.works/docs/spiff-arena/explanation/dev/technical_overview.html
---

☰ Menu

# Technical Overview[](#technical-overview "Link to this heading")

## Components[](#components "Link to this heading")

graph TD
subgraph spiff-arena
Backend
Frontend
end
subgraph Backend
subgraph SpiffWorkflow lib
end
end
subgraph Frontend
subgraph bpmn-js-spiffworkflow lib
end
end
Frontend -- uses REST API --> Backend
Backend -- delegates to --> C
Backend -- persists to --> DB
DB[(mysql/postgres)]
C[Connector Proxy]

Spiff Arena is a system that allows users to build and execute BPMN diagrams.
It is composed of three applications, [spiffworkflow-frontend](frontend.html), [spiffworkflow-backend](backend_api.html), and, optionally, a [connector proxy](connector_proxy.html).

## Source code layout[](#source-code-layout "Link to this heading")

From a source code perspective, there are three repositories that may be of interest:

- [spiff-arena](https://github.com/sartography/spiff-arena) - Includes spiffworkflow-frontend, spiffworkflow-backend, and connector-proxy-demo.
- [SpiffWorkflow](https://github.com/sartography/SpiffWorkflow) - The core SpiffWorkflow library, 10 years old, Python, awesome, [well-documented](https://spiff.works/docs/spiffworkflow/).
- [bpmn-js-spiffworkflow](https://github.com/sartography/bpmn-js-spiffworkflow) - The frontend library that extends bpmn-js to work with SpiffWorkflow.