Hi everyone, we are developing an open source process modeling tool that runs in the web browser. You might have already heard about the Oryx project (http://bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Oryx for users and http://code.google.com/p/oryx-editor/ for developers). It specifically supports BPMN 1.2 and other process modeling languages. Just check out our online installation.
I think Oryx could be the perfect frontend for graphical BPEL debugging. Recently, we have implemented two components that should make it quite easy to integrate with Apache ODE: - There is a mashup-API that is very similar to Google's Maps API: It provides a read-only view for process models and allows to easily visualize additional information on top of it. E.g. you can add speech bubbles to elements in the model, in turn containing e.g. HTML divs. We have used this API already to integrate with a number of other systems (such as ticket management systems and BPM engines). Checkout examples at http://bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Oryx/MOVI. - We have implemented a BPEL-2-BPMN transformator that visualizes BPEL processes using BPMN. The generated BPMN diagram is then layouted automatically. For details please check out our academic paper at http://bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/pub/Public/GeroDecker/coopis2008-bpel2bpmn.pdf. Oryx is developed under MIT license. The server component is developed in Java, the client-side code is JavaScript. Rendering happens through SVG (in the editing mode) and PNG in the read-only mashup-mode. The final setup with Apache ODE could look as follows: A slim Oryx-war is deployed in addition to the Apache ODE server, allowing for the BPEL-2-BPMN transformation, the PNG-generation and the delivery of the JavaScript-code to the browser. The debugging-mashup comes on top, accessing the corresponding ODE-APIs and visualizing it using the Oryx-functionality. As an idea for the future, one could also think about using Oryx as configuration frontend for BPEL processes. We have implemented BPMN-2-BPEL transformations which could serve as basis for this. We would be very happy to contribute as mentors in a joint Google Summer of Code project. What do you think? Cheers, Gero
