User development,

The document "A good start!", was updated Mar 3, 2010
by Robert (Bob) Brodt.

To view the document, visit:
http://community.jboss.org/docs/DOC-14913#cf

Document:
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Not just the punchline to an indelicate lawyer joke and a memorable quote from 
a 90's movie, “a good start” also describes the BPEL tooling that is offered as 
part of the 
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/JBossTools31CR2CDILessTypingAndTheLastPolish. 
While this release focuses mainly on stabilizing existing tools and the 
addition of new features, the BPEL Editor User Experience (as I'm sure the 
JBossTools team will agree) still leaves much to be desired.
 
Besides having an incredibly non-intuitive user interface bordering on the user 
hostile, the eclipse BPEL Editor still has quite a few serious bugs and gaps in 
functionality. After having played with Riftsaw and the JBossTools for about a 
month, I came up with a list of fixes and enhancements I'd like to see 
implemented within the next few releases. Some of these are “nice to have”, 
others are a definite “must have”.
 
“Must have” Features:
* Validation: While there has been a      great deal of work already done to 
improve the BPEL validation, I      still ran across some compilation errors 
that the in-built validator      did not catch. My recommendation would be to 
run the Riftsaw bpelc      compiler during a project build to ensure the bpel 
will compile.      Compilation is relatively fast and I don't anticipate this 
being a      huge problem if the user has “Build Automatically” enabled on      
the eclipse Project.
* Refactoring: Often times I find      myself changing the names of variables, 
port types, partner links,      etc. either in the Property sheet or directly 
on the editor canvas      without thinking; what I really wanted to do was 
refactor the name      change and have it propagate through to the WSDL or XSD 
where the      element is defined. It would be simple enough to provide a 
change      listener that prompts you with “Hey, I noticed you changed the      
name of this <thing> - did you intend to refactor instead?”      possibly with 
a “Don't ask me again!” checkbox. The same      functionality should be 
provided for the WSDL and XSD editor. This      would go a long way to better 
integration within the tooling.
* Better synchronization between      design & source views and Property sheets.
 
“Nice to have” Features:
* Complex variable initialization      within Assign: this could easily be 
solved with the addition of a      button to the Assign Properties/Details tab 
which displays a      variables selection dialog. The editor could then 
generate the      appropriate XML to initialize complex variables. Apparently, 
the      Riftsaw engine requires the structure of complex variables to be set   
   before they can be accessed.
* Debugging (really, really nice to      have): At the least I would like to be 
able to set breakpoints and      inspect variables at runtime; of course a 
full-featured interactive      debugger, which allows single-stepping, changing 
variables,      watchpoints, etc. would be nice to have.
* “Follow link” capabilities      from the BPEL editor to WSDL/XSD and from 
WSDL editor to XSD for      messages, port types and partner links.
 
Must fix Bugs:
* The namespace cache is not being      refreshed correctly when editing in 
source view. This causes some      strange validation errors, as message parts 
and variables may no      longer be resolved correctly.
* The validator does not understand      return types of xpath functions; e.g. 
starts-with() returns boolean,      but when used in a condition, the validator 
reports this as “not a      boolean expression”
* The concat() function argument      validation appears to have a bug; not all 
arguments are  recognized      correctly as variable references.
* There appears to be some kind of      caching problem in the validator 
(unrelated to namespaces) which      prevents it from correctly resolving 
variable parts. Sometimes the      only way to remove Error Markers is to close 
and reopen a project.
 
I'd like to use this wiki document as a "wish list" for new features, so please 
feel free to add your $0.02 worth!

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