Please post to the newsgroup

Published on June 12, 2008 in BPMN, Eclipse and Intalio. 4 Comments

Lately I have had a lot of private emails from people asking for help both on the Eclipse and Intalio sides.

Here is the answer I come up with now:

Hi, as an Eclipse committer I cannot reply to conversations in private, as they include IP that might lead to litigation (for example if next month Intalio comes up with the system you describe, and I helped you with that, your company could sue).

If you wish to talk to me privately, there needs to be an agreement between our companies, you can contact sales@intalio.com to that regard.

Depending wether this is Eclipse or Intalio:

In the mean time, please post to the forum: http://bpms.intalio.com/forums.html and I will reply there, as well as the community.

In the mean time, you can post to the newsgroup, to stp-dev@eclipse.org or stp-user@eclipse.org. (and I’ll reply the best I can).
You can also ask on #eclipse-stp on irc.freenode.net.

So if you are tempted to talk to me privately, please tell me why, or you will get something like this email.

Question to the Eclipse community: how do you guys handle emails like this ? is there a guideline for committers posted somewhere ? (I didn’t really look, it might be just around the corner).

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Intalio User Conference

Published on June 2, 2008 in BPMN and Eclipse. 0 Comments

I bring a message of love from my company, Intalio, to the Eclipse community.

Folks, if you want to know the in and outs of BPM, are interested into BPMN or dig BPEL, we have cool discounts for you at the Intalio user conference.

In particular, we will be addressing the extension capabilities of the BPMN modeler, how to add a new form technology to our Designer.

There will also be some very cool stuff about SOA, including REST sessions (here and here).

The conference is all about our users too, so they will have the opportunity to quizz us, and get a live support session with our VP of support himself.

Contact me directly if you are interested!

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Going back to Windows

Published on May 11, 2008 in help and windows. 0 Comments

I left Windows back in 2006 with no regret, moving to Linux and now Mac.

Yersterday I had to do some maintenance work on a family computer. The thing was dead slow and clogged with popups.

Here is a simple list of software to survive those situations:
-RegCleaner:
The killer app for Windows. Just get it and edit your registry settings. You will be amazed to see how many freaky programs are being launched on startup without asking for consent.
-Ad-aware Free:
I found something like 400 malwares on the computer. That was a good head start.
-Antivir:
Antivir was completely outdated on the computer. Upgrading to the latest version, I found 50 viruses.
-Sygate Personal Firewall
I really like SPF because it’s free, and it asks you when a program needs to access to Internet.
The popup is pretty annoying, yet you learn how your computer works, and you really take control over the network access.
You can gradually set filters, so that the firewall doesn’t bother you all the time ; you will notice first hand when a virus tries to use the port 25 or connect to some poker website.

Hope this helps someone!

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Where is my EPL ?

Published on March 6, 2008 in BPMN and Eclipse. 1 Comment

I have been meaning to post that one for a long time, please pardon my dust.

I had an odd question from a STP user the other day:
“So”, he said, “what license are you guys working with ?”
It sounded too obvious. Then he added that he had browsed the website without finding the license page.

Truth is, compared to the Apache websites who always have a direct link to the license, in Eclipse you have to browse for the Legal Resources to grab your copy of the EPL.

So how about adding a link somewhere in the Phoenix template to send to our license ? If you think that is a good idea, please vote for Bug 198975 – Add a link to the EPL.

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Facebox on the Eclipse website

Published on March 6, 2008 in BPMN, Eclipse, facebox and web. 0 Comments

I would like to be able to use Facebox on the Eclipse website, particularly our BPMN page.

Facebox is a neat Javascript library built on top of JQuery that shows images and/or HTML in nice boxes showing on top of the existing page. See the Facebox index page for examples.

Of course I would craft some kind of theme to match the Eclipse site, right now the box looks too much like a well known social website.

I opened a bug against the Eclipse website to examine possible issues regarding the Eclipse policy. Those two libraries are licensed under the MIT license.

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How about a Babathon ?

Published on February 25, 2008 in BPMN, Eclipse and babel. 1 Comment

Denis Roy just posted on the committers list a call for help:

[..] we need you, the Eclipse committer, to help define the PDE .map files that are used to build your project’s plugins. Once your .map files are defined, we’ll crawl through CVS, scanning for the externalized strings in the various .properties files, enabling them for translation using the web tool. The end goal is to produce language packs that everyone can download and use.[..]

To help out the work of the Babel committers, I proposed a “Babathon”:

It would be very nice to organize an event similar to a Hackathon, that would
concentrate the efforts of the community into translating as many Strings as
possible.

Please vote for this bug if you like it!

PS: Please note that projects that are hosted on Subversion cannot be used with the Babel server yet, you can follow this issue to track progress.

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Manifest reader in Ruby

Published on February 24, 2008 in Eclipse, manifest and ruby. 2 Comments

Manifest files are incorporated in jar files to help describe them.
In the OSGi world, they have a critical mission: describe the OSGi bundle that the jar becomes, giving its name, its transitive dependencies and its execution parameters.

I initiated some time ago a project named Manifest in Rubyforge, licensed under the Apache 2 License.
Assaf helped put some meat on the bones with his reader used in the Buildr tests (source, around line 41).
I added some more code to parse the OSGi attributes. For example, when you parse the org.eclipse.compare plugin, you can query it like this:

manifest.sections.first["Require-Bundle"]["org.eclipse.core.expressions"]["bundle-version"]

This returns "[3.3.0,4.0.0)".

The first release is tagged 0.0.1, and you can install it with rubygems:

gem install manifest
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Eclipsepedia and BPMN samples

Published on February 24, 2008 in BPMN, Eclipse and Intalio. 0 Comments

This week we have made good progress in creating samples and getting real on extension documentation.

In my opinion though, the font used for the source code is too small. I opened a bug regarding this issue, please voice your opinion there!

PS: I have added some guidelines to format source code to the help page. I hope this helps someone. :)

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Get more, get BPMN 0.8!

Published on February 20, 2008 in BPMN, Eclipse, Intalio and new and noteworthy. 0 Comments

Tonight with the release of STP M5, the BPMN modeler will come bundled with a pile of improvements.(see last week post to get the overview).

  • Better group support
    We have now a good support of groups. They add activities when resizing or moving, and activities update their groups when resizing and moving, or being created.
    There seems that there are a few glitches on the popupbar edit policy, which tends to show at the center of the pool when Ctrl+Space is hit on top of a group.
    Groups look and feel
  • Icons everywhere
    Hugues added icons for the multiple events and the signal events. We have a very fancy collection of icons now. They do not all reflect the BPMN 1.1 style, we are working on that.
  • Complex gateway palette item
    Just added, still hot from the compiler.
    Support for complex gateways
  • Throwing and catching shapes
    In BPMN 1.1, the throwing or catching property is dictated by the messages on the event, or is user selected.
    Shapes filling depending on their messages
    We added an action for the user to select that one, in case the event has no messages.
    Select throwing or catching shape action
  • We have worked on adding support for TODO, XXX and FIXME tasks on text annotations.

    Meaning you can take a text annotation, and write “TODO buy milk” in its label.
    Automagically, a task marker will show on save and you will see the task in the Tasks view. The task supports the “Go To” action through the GMF goodness.
    BPMN support for task annotations

  • Message connections between pools
    We have added a little menu item for the end connection menu, so that you can connect to the underlying pool.
    Pool messages don’t look good yet though: we have a specific framework to create anchors that was very specific to activities,
    and we won’t have cycles to work on that just now.
  • Pool message handles
    Grab a pool handle and drag all you can, those handles will enable you to connect to an other pool or activity with a messaging edge.
  • Sequence edges and messaging edges support associations with artifacts
    This seems to be a very stable new feature.
    Associations on edges
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Acronyms

Published on February 15, 2008 in General and web. 7 Comments

I was puzzled to see this post from Chad showing up in my feeds reader with a nice underlined word, animated when mousing over it.


It so occurs that the acronym tag can be used to do that. No Javascript involved.
This might be an old trick, but it just works. Thanks Chad!

UPDATE: See the comments, use abbr instead.

UPDATE 2: See Chad’s post:

1. : a tag that is supported by more browsers now, but may become obsolete in the future, judging by a proposed specification that may one day become a standard
2. : a tag that, right now, isn’t supported properly by the browser with the single biggest share of the market — and, thus, the browser used by the most potential visitors or customers at your website

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