Archive for February, 2008

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.

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

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. :)

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

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

Graphical goodies for the BPMN modeler

Published on February 15, 2008 in BPMN, Eclipse, General, Intalio and new and noteworthy. 2 Comments

We have worked hard on the BPMN modeler and have a few things to show off.

Some semantic changes

  • Associations can target sequence and messaging edges.

    • At the semantic level only. We are actively working on making it possible to connect them in the diagram.

  • Pools hold messaging edges.

    • We haven’t worked on making it possible in the editor as well, but the semantic model accepts those now.

Support for BPMN 1.1

We are heading for basic support of BPMN 1.1. You can deactivate it in the BPMN Diagrams preference page.

  • Signal events

    • They really don’t look good yet, and we are looking for help on that
    Signal events.

  • The look and feel of shapes is BPMN 1.1 compliant

    • Multiple event and event-based gateway a la BPMN 1.1 sauce
    Throwing and catching events are not drawn in the same way

  • Routing of sequence edges with gateways has drastically improved.

    • Nice looking diagram

    More

    • We have added the link and multiple events to the palette.

      • We miss images for those items right now, as well as the ones for the signal event. Working on that bit.

    • Only one connection handle shows at a time in the diagram.

      • We wanted to have only one connection handle showing at a time. That way when you mouse over the shapes, they don’t animate all at the same time.

    • Terminate events are better centered

      • Better centered terminate end events

    • Improvements over lanes

      • Lanes
      Lanes can now have a background color, and they resize in a better way that they used to.

    • We have fixed a pesky bug when using the BPMN modeler in a different editing domain.

    We hope you enjoy those improvements, will be inspired by them and will give us a hand at the next Eclipse bug day!