Extending explorer

[thetoolman]

How do we customised the explorer, for example adding group-specific "home pages" with buttons to quickly start processes.  And what about extending the forms to more comprehensive inputs?   Wiring in management of real domain objects?

I had been expecting to write the whole interface for each process manually. I'm not clear if the explorer app is intended for production use, or is it just a well built stub that developers are suggested to hack and extend. 

Any suggestions?

[jbarrez]

The explorer webapp can be extended, the source is available after all.

However, we did not created it with extensibility in mind.

[thetoolman]

OK, so is Explorer supposed to be a demo or a production tool ?

[jbarrez]

At this point in time, I would say it is a demo tool. However, I've heard that some people use it in production.
Note that in the coming time, we will make Explorer more powerful and become a real production tool.

[heymjo]

Would it be possible to give a few hints about the explorer roadmap in terms of features and expected delivery dates ?

We are now at a point where we need to decide if we're going to invest time in customizing the existing explorer or redevelop something similar as a vaadin component to be embedded for each application. Since the explorer is currently 'DEMO' we're hesitant to invest too much time in the first option. We have seen the vaadin blog entry about activiti so maybe we'll start from there.

On the other hand, since you also seem to be going down the vaadin route (yay!) would it not be feasible to be able to plug the full process explorer as a customizable vaadin component in an application ? That would be very cool

Jorg

[jbarrez]

Imo, the safest bet will always be to build it yourself.
Our UI's will always be generic, and mostly 'demo-ware' as our main focus is obviously the engine.

And if you are using Vaadin, it shouldnt take more than a week, right 😉