Re: [jbpm-dev] Features and jBPM 5 - Adapters
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/t...
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-webservic...
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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