There’s a new proposal for an Eclipse BPMN 2.0 Modeller here and here.
“The BPMN 2.0 Modeler provides a graphical modeling tool which allows creation and editing of BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) diagrams. The tool is built on Eclipse Graphiti and uses the BPMN 2.0 EMF meta model currently being developed within the Eclipse Model Development Tools (MDT) project. This meta model is compatible with the BPMN 2.0 specification (herafter “the specification”) proposed by the Object Management Group.”
This is interesting to me for the following reasons:
- It serves as a template for how you might get a modelling tool adopted by the Eclipse Foundation
- The use of the other Eclipse frameworks (MDT, EMF and Mangrove)
- BPMN 2.0 defines a Presentation Model
- Red Hat, Inc. commissioned Codehoop, OU to develop the initial basic editing framework for this editor, with the understanding that it would eventually become an Eclipse project
- Graphiti – this might be a better toolkit for the Presentation Model paradigm than GEF
I think I can learn from this project.
The first thing I’d like to investigate is Graphiti with a view to using it for the Graphics toolkit in Archi 2.0. I’d have to ensure that it could do all that we can presently do with GEF/Draw2D and more. Would like to see:
- Better support for bendpoints and line routers
- Better support for connection anchors
- Additional UI functionality as found in GMF
- Archi requires one generic type Command Stack per model consisting of many diagrams, not one Command Stack per diagram
- Better everything!
[Later] – had a quick play with Graphiti. It’s built on top of GEF. It might be better just to add extra functionality on top of my Archi GEF UI layer. It’s yet another framework to do battle with, poor documentation, only one example, trial and error…move along, move along…
