During the Activiti Community Kick-Off in Stuttgart, we investigated the idea of running the Activiti Modeler inside Eclipse. Finally, I found the time to fix a user agent check, which prohibited opening the modeler with the internal browser of Eclipse. The fix is already committed in Subversion and will be included in the next Activiti release.
On Windows the internal browser of Eclipse defaults to Internet Explorer, which lacks the SVG support required by the modeler. However, Windows users can install "AJAX Tools Framework Mozilla IDE" from http://www.eclipse.org/atf/ to replace the it with the rendering engine of Mozilla Firefox.
Given this first success, I would now like to discuss further options for integration.
The next obvious step, is to import the file-system-based repository of the modeler residing in 'apps/activiti-model-repository' into an Eclipse project. That allows direct access to the BPMN 2.0 XML using the XML editor of Eclipse.
Does anybody know how to teach Eclipse that it should open a file with the extension '.oryx.xml' in a browser and append the absolute path of the file to the URL of the modeler like in the following example?
Just a thought, but I'm quite shure eclipse exposes methods/classes that allow you to launch an URL in the system browser, without you having to worry about platform an stuf. If this is available, the only thing you have to do is create a url (http://localhost:8080/activiti-modeler/p/editor?id=…) based on the .oryx.xml file in your custom IEditorLauncher.
