Eclipse SOA Tools Blog

Consult the bug 240335 and unzip the attachment to read the first draft of the proposal of the BPMN modeler to go from the status of component to sub-project.

Our main goals for the 1.1 release so far are:

• Implement quick fixes: we have added validation to our diagrams, now we want people to be able to right-click and fix the problem they encounter.
• Add an export tool a la Eclipse Spaces. Be able to deploy a diagram as a zip file, associated with an image and a description.
• Package the BPMN modeler as part of a modeling practitioners Eclipse Product (see bug 240141)

Feel free to comment on the bug!

Intalio provides a packaged version of the SOA Tools BPMN modeler.

Grab it here and start modeling in minutes.

Would you have any problems using it, please file a bug at the usual location or ask for help on the eclipse.stp newsgroup or by IRC: #eclipse-stp.

Cross-posting from the Intalio blog…

Over the week-end, one (1!) user translated the BPMN modeler in Japanese. That’s over 800 strings! Thanks Sawada-san!

Thanks to the Babel team too to bear with us and give us such a great tool!

If you are interested in translating your favorite Eclipse project, just register and start right away.

We had a very cool contribution a few weeks ago. Till Essers contributed a wiki page that shows how to hide property tabs.

If that wasn’t enough, he contributed a patch today, along with Anshu.

We have been following Ed’s advice, always answer on the newsgroups, and so far it is paying off.

Hi everyone,

Hugues Malphettes will be presenting the BPMN modeler from the inside at the Intalio user conference, particularly focusing on how to extend it.

The Intalio User Conference will take place on the 17th and 18th of June 2008 in San Francisco.

Feel free to drop in, we will be happy to discuss with you over a coffee.

The BPMN team is happy to announce that the BPMN modeler code is tagged for RC1.

RC1 binaries will be available on the 21st of May, thanks to Oisin.

Go, grab the code, and get ready for some wow effect with our new shadow support.

Happily there was no need for the crowd to dip into the tar and feathers buckets

We had a crowd of 15 people, and despite us having some bumps in the road, I got a very nice comment about the quality of the examples and there was also some keen interest from people that are already using Camel.

Our biggest issue was that we couldn’t deploy routes in the container if Java 6 was running At the end of the tutorial, one of the attendees came up and said that this was probably because of a clash with JAXB. Basically the ServiceMix 4 container had a JAXB bundle deployed in it for use with Java 5, but since Java 6 has JAXB built-in, there could have been some horrible clash going on. The workaround is to spot the JAXB plugins in the container and osgi uninstall them to remove them from the bundle cache, then restart.

Andrea (STP-IM committer) couldn’t get the EID to start up with the Ganymede distribution on the stick. Everything seemed to be in place, with no errors, but none of the EID contributions were active. There’s a bug223024 for this.

There was a couple of other bumps too - sometimes you could get two camelContext.xml synthesized bundles, and they seemed to upset each other. Simple workaround - just osgi uninstall both the offenders. I was really glad of the ServiceMix 4 kernel console!

I got some questions about capabilities: why is the graph bound to an ESB? Couldn’t each component be bound to different ESBs? How about sub-graphs? Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to see a component and when you drill into it, it’s actually another graph of finer-grained EIPs?

Some good questions there - I think the sub-graph idea is good, especially if you want to have reusable EIPs that you have created within your own organization. As was pointed out to me, you could have the graphs bound to ESBs if you had the sub-graphing concept and still have the flexibility to have an overall integration that covers different runtimes. I think covering multiple runtimes simultaneously is something that is just unavoidable in the real world.

Another thing : the Apache Camel ‘DSL’ - which allows the construction of routes using plain old Java - is the foremost way of making routes right now. If we could generate these Java fluent builders from the patterns diagrams, it would be a great starting point for developers.

All of the examples, code, etc, will be put up on the website at some point for download. Because we only got up to three little green patterns (LGPs?), and Gregor and Bobby’s book has 65 of them, a series of examples for each new pattern that we support would be the way to go. So maybe we’ll have a long-running series on our hands

With all that cool stuff just checked in the SVN,

We are now starting to work on the EclipseCon tutorial.

We have created two wiki pages:

• One for using the modeler.

We will add here all the nice things that make day to day modeling with this tool fun and eventually useful.

• One for extending the modeler.

There you will get the crunchy bits on how to develop on top of the BPMN modeler. There has been more demand on that area, so we will probably start by them.

Anyway, any questions ? We welcome any help, in particular code samples to populate those pages, and the SVN.

Thanks for reading!

The BPMN team

Hi Guys, for my first post I’m happy to announce a product release related to the project I’m working on in Eclipse STP, the STP Intermediate Model. The product in question is Spagic 2.0 which has just been released by Engineering, one of the partners working on STP-IM. Spagic, a complete SOA suite for design, realization, deployment and monitoring of ESB infrastructure is based on the STP-IM. For more information check out http://spagic.org.

Kudos to Tyler Anderson, who just published a really cool article on the execution of business processes, using the STP BPMN modeler to draw his model, getting it consumable with ATL, and running it on Apache ODE.