[jbpm-dev] Features and jBPM 5 - Adapters

[Kris Verlaenen]

Brad,

Are you familiar with the concept of domain-specific work items in 
Drools Flow?   As that is an extension with the purpose of facilitating 
communication with external components:
https://hudson.jboss.org/hudson/job/drools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/trunk/target/docs/drools-flow/html/ch.Domain_Specific_Processes.html

It seems to be a perfect match almost, as Drools Flow uses it to provide 
out-of-the-box support for things like File management, FTP, Email, 
Jabber, REST, RSS, Google calendar, and a few more.  We are hoping we 
can build like a library of these components, so that people can 
contribute an adapter if they have implemented one for their specific 
use case that might be useful to other people as well.

When creating your process, you can then decide which one you need, and 
they will show up in your Eclipse process palette.  Ok, not those 
wizards yet etc., but seems the core is there already.

Let me know what you think.

Kris

Brad Davis wrote:
> I also have been thinking about a Adapter architecture. An Adapter would facilitate communication between the workflow and other components.
>
> Adapters in the Oracle BPEL environment are basically Wizards which allow the configuring of different Gateways [using the SOA-P term].
> http://technology.amis.nl/blog/504/publishing-plsql-services-as-webservice-using-oracle-bpel-t
>
> As you can see this the article above, Oracle offers: File, FTP, AQ, Database, JMS and Oracle Application Adapters.
>
> I believe having File, Database, JMS, FTP, and Web Services adapters would move the product forward.  Each Adapter would have a Wizard which plugs into the Eclipse jBPM Toolset.  The Wizard would walk the user through configuring the Adapter.  I believe JBoss has the related technologies that could come together for great adapters.  
>
> As an example: In Oracle BPEL, they achieve very sophisticated SQL Adapters to Oracle databases.  It can be used to interact with a datasource and provides CRUD operations.  In the background, Oracle uses the Wizard on the Workflow UI to generate Toplink code; this is transparent to the experience for the workflow developers, who never has to work with Toplink.  At JBoss, we have a very advanced Hibernate Tools set in Eclipse which could work as a backbone for an experience similar to the Oracle Toplink Adapter; after the Wizard has completed, the user could interact with the Adapter in Object form.
>
> For a Web Service Adapter, we could take advantage of JAX-WS to generate the client code in the background.  
>
> If jBPM is targeting new features for jBPM 5, it would be great to include a plugable Eclipse Wizard (Adapter) feature into the jBPM Workflow UI.  That way, if users or 3rd parties want to add adapters to the jBPM Eclipse Tooling, we support it.  We could start by offering the simplest adapters to write: FTP, File, JMS.  As the product matures, we could offer the more advanced adapters like the Database [Hibernate] adapter, and Web Service [JAX-WS], noted above.  
>
> Brad
>
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