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).
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. 
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.
-
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.
-
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.

We added an action for the user to select that one, in case the event has no messages.
-
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.
-
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.
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
.
- The look and feel of shapes is BPMN 1.1 compliant

Routing of sequence edges with gateways has drastically improved.

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

- Improvements over 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!
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!
Follow up with yesterday:
you can get my Scala syntax gem extension here, and read below for the instructions on how to install it.
First here is the result:
class Auction(seller: Actor, minBid: Int, closing: Date) extends Actor {
val StringForFun = "hello"
val timeToShutdown = 36000000 val bidIncrement = 10
def act() {
var maxBid = minBid - bidIncrement
var maxBidder: Actor = null
var running = true
while (running) {
receiveWithin ((closing.getTime() - new Date().getTime())) {
case Offer(bid, client) =>
if (bid >= maxBid + bidIncrement) {
if (maxBid >= minBid) maxBidder ! BeatenOffer(bid)
maxBid = bid; maxBidder = client; client ! BestOffer
} else {
client ! BeatenOffer(maxBid)
}
case Inquire(client) =>
client ! Status(maxBid, closing)
case TIMEOUT =>
if (maxBid >= minBid) {
val reply = AuctionConcluded(seller, maxBidder)
maxBidder ! reply; seller ! reply
} else {
seller ! AuctionFailed
}
receiveWithin(timeToShutdown) {
case Offer(_, client) => client ! AuctionOver
case TIMEOUT => running = false
}
}
}
}
}
You will need to add those CSS elements to display things correctly:
pre {
background: #000000 repeat-x;
color: #00FF00;
font-family: arial, 'lucida console', sans-serif;
line-height: 160%;
font-size: 120%;
}
code {
color: #00EE00;
font-style: bold;
font-family: arial, 'lucida console', sans-serif;
}
.comment { color: #333; font-style: italic; }
.keyword { color: #eff; font-weight: bold; }
.punct { color: #444; font-weight: bold; }
.symbol { color: #0bb; }
.string { color: #6b4; }
.ident { color: #00b; }
.constant { color: #66f; }
.regex { color: #a82; }
.number { color: #a33; }
.expr { color: #227; }
Then on your machine, you will need ruby and rubygems installed, and install redcloth and syntax:
gem install syntax
gem install redcloth
Put your sample into a text file in the same folder as run.rb, then run:
ruby run.rb myscala.txt > output.html
That’s about it. It’d be great to develop the same things for Java and CSS. In the mean time, enjoy!
I started working for Intalio more than a year ago.
At the time I was a young software engineer with some skills regarding the Eclipse platform.
I grabbed a seat, and stayed there learning how to code with a team, parsing XML, understanding BPEL, hacking WSDL and groking Ruby.
Working for Intalio is fun. I personally feel like I am constantly rewarding myself. Every feature we bring in is a new skill, a new technology we master.
There is no forbidden path to achievement, we always take the shortest one, and that means slashing into code, rewriting, beautifying, migrating fearlessly.
In a small structure like this one, one thing continues to astonish me: we don’t discuss objectives. We all know where we fit and bend together to make it work.
For the last year we have been running a marathon, rewriting most of the Designer. I am proud of announcing to you that it is available for everyone and for free out there.
Ismael thanks all the persons that made it possible, and I’d like to thank them too, not only the team today, but the team I did not have the chance to know two or three years ago.
After this release, nothing has changed. We are still focused on the product and delivering the best experience to our customers.
We already started digging and have some finds for 5.1.
More on all this very soon.