[jbpm-dev] Features and jBPM 5 - Adapters

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