Hi, Gero --
I thought it was an excellent idea both times you sent it. :)
Any thought to using canvas in place of the SVG? My initial
experiments with it (non-Ode-related) have shown better performance
and uniformity between browsers (FF/Safari).
Best.
-- Paul
On Mar 12, 2009, at 9:44 AM, Decker, Gero wrote:
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
