topic Re: Activiti Explorer and Vaadin forms in Alfresco Archive

Activiti Explorer and Vaadin forms

kaech — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:49:34 GMT

I saw your announcement about the new Vaadin-based Activiti-Explorer and just installed Activiti 5.7.It looks very nice!Now I have a couple of questions:1. Has Cycle and the Modeler been removed from the distribution? If yes, why?2. Not that Vaadin is used as GUI-Technology, how does that affect the

Re: Activiti Explorer and Vaadin forms

ronald_van_kuij — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:34:27 GMT

d. What is the preferred technology for form development?

IMHO, the technology of your choice. The form technology of the BPMS'es I've used was never sufficient. It was interesting for small RAD type of demos, but not full blown apps. We always developed custom forms, part of our full (web) app and used jBPM and now Activiti for what it is realy good at, managing the (work)flow.

My personal choice for real business oriented forms has always been XForms (http://www.betterform.de)

Re: Activiti Explorer and Vaadin forms

kaech — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:43:06 GMT

That sounds as if the task dashboard in the Activiti-Explorer is just a proof fo concept and not meant for enterprise class development?
In a complex business scenario it would be better to implement a custom dashboard with the technology of choice, right?
Thanks to the modular api it doesn' seem to be big deal. Just to make sure that I am on the right track.

Re: Activiti Explorer and Vaadin forms

trademak — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:25:41 GMT

As Ronald already pointed out, it's really up to which form technology you want to use.
I don't regard the new Activiti Explorer as a proof of concept, and it may be enough for your use case.
But if you want to implement a lot of new functionality you have 2 choices:

1. Extend the Activiti Explorer
2. Implement your own dashboard

Best regards,

Re: Activiti Explorer and Vaadin forms

heymjo — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:33:56 GMT

That sounds as if the task dashboard in the Activiti-Explorer is just a proof fo concept and not meant for enterprise class development?

See also http://forums.activiti.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1267. Unless the point of view changed now that Vaadin is in play, the delivered tools currently are just there to showcase the possibilities of the engine.

In a complex business scenario it would be better to implement a custom dashboard with the technology of choice, right?

This is a decision point for any BPM execution engine tool. You could e.g. take Oracle BPM Suite and decide not to reuse their whole JSF tooling stack that is fine. But the cost of developing these things yourself is real and substantial. So if the engine provides tooling that is easy to extend and/or embed then this is a huge bonus. You'll see that all projects deciding to create their own task dashboard will end up with something that is 85% similar.

So yeah it would be really nice if these tools in Activiti were not just presented as 'demo' and developed with extensibility and pluggability in mind. The Vaadin components are already quite reusable, but who wants to extend or embed a class marked as 'demo' ?

Re: Activiti Explorer and Vaadin forms

kaech — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:13:35 GMT

Thanks for the clarification.

Could it be that the activiti:formKey-Attribute on the UserTask is deprecated in 5.7?
It seems that the user forms in the new Vaadin-based Explorer are completely generated from the activiti:formProperty elements. Is that right?

If yes, is there still a way to provide custom user forms to the Activiti-Explorer, like it was possible with the activiti:formKey in older versions of Activiti?

No problem, if not. I think I have to follow the "custom dashboard"-route anyway.

Re: Activiti Explorer and Vaadin forms

eye — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:43:12 GMT

Hi everyone,

I missed a few updates due to other stuff I was doing. A few days ago I tried to deploy my "old" process into a freshly updated activiti 5.7. I also have the feeling that the old form-renderer is missing. Am I correct? And if: is there a workaround to get the old .form-files to work again or do I really have to code my own dashboard? Maybe I am missing something here.

Kind regards

Dirk

Re: Activiti Explorer and Vaadin forms

trademak — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:34:20 GMT

Hi,

The Activiti Explorer uses the form properties approach, and no longer the .form html definitions.
The formKey is still supported if you want to develop your own form rendering as described in the user guide.

Best regards,