By Jonathan Crow

Last week I pseudo-live blogged the Alfresco Community Conference. This week we are at EclipseCon 2008. The first session I am going to post some thoughts about is "Get the most out of BPMN Modeling." I might be a little biased as this one is being presented by Antoine Toulme and Hugues Malphettes from Intalio. But look here for updates on other sessions as the conference progresses. (see bottom for updates)

And we begin. Antoine is talking about the BPMN modeler an SOA tool, standards based, semantic model based on EMF with graphical aspects of GEF and GMF, Going 1.0 with Ganymede, and getting acronym overload;).

Now into the demonstration. Antoine is building a new BPMN diagram for bugzilla, bringing up the modeler. He prefers the palette open at the same time. Showing off the shapes, start events, intermediary events (the ones in the middle that change the flow), end events, gateways (exclusive and inclusive data and events) and artifacts (groups and data objects).

When you start the task, you create a new pool with a new task. Change it to the start task, and name it something like "Experience a bug". When the bug is written to bugzilla a message is sent "new bug" to the Committer pool. Now Antoine is showing off the gateway, where a choice can govern the flow between two or more options. Ok enough of the play by play. You can grab the code they used to demonstrate

EclipseCon_2008.zip

Code.zip



and play for yourself. But a cool new thing, you can attach documents to processes. This was not in the original specification, but Intalio found it helpful and made sure to include it.

Now on to annotations. There are two types of annotation - one specified by the BPMN standard (text annotations), the other type they are now demonstrating is data you are attaching to shapes. Intalio provides extensions to add by drag and drop, manage the look and filter by context. Annotations are like pointers to other objects, similar to WSDLs. The fear is that models will get too big, so everything lives apart. Annotations gives Intalio a way to stay up with the most recent spec's on BPMN while providing as much stability as possible.

Extending the modeler - we had to customize the GMF generated code to enable extending, regenerating and forking the modeler. Don't forget to check back here for a report on day 2. The presentation is available on Scribd at

Updates for other EclipseCon 2008 sessions:
EclipseCon Keynote: Fake Steve Jobs
EclipseCon Exhibit Hall: MyEclipse, Collabnet, and Crystal Reports
EclipseCon Session: Cloudsmith, OSGi, and Android.
EclipseCon Keynote: Open Source and Microsoft.

March 17th, 2008