Archive for the 'General' Category

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

    Intalio|BPMS 5.1 is out

    Published on December 26, 2007 in BPMN, Eclipse and Intalio. 0 Comments

    I’m very happy to announce that we made a new release of Intalio|BPMS.

    We have fixed bugs in this release, introduced a new tool named “Insert space” (it deserves a separate blog post that should come soon).

    Overall the modeling experience is now even smoother.

    We also upgraded Designer and Server to support java 6.

    You can get all this new stuff for free right now on our community web site.

    Happy holidays!