How to extend Activiti with my own service task implementation ?

[cdeneux]

Hi all,

I'm the tech-leader of Petals ESB (petals.ow2.org) that is a distributed service infrastructure. We have chosen Activiti as BPMN2 engine to support the implementation of business processes over our service infrastructure.
As services available into Petals ESB can be invoked as service tasks from business processes, I think that we need to create a service task implementation able to do Petals ESB native calls. Searching on Internet, I have not found any extension mechanism supported by Activiti to add such service task implementation. Reading the Activiti source code, it seems to me that service task implementations are hard-coded (org.activiti.engine.impl.bpmn.parser.handler.ServiceTaskParseHandler.executeParse(…)).

Can you confirm me that it is right ?

If yes, are you interested by a dynamic loading of service task implementations, based on Java Service Provider Interface (java.util.ServiceLoader<S>) ? I can write and contribute this feature.

Regards,
Christophe

[martin_grofcik]

Hi Christophe

Modeler
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/ACT/Extending+Modeler+with+new+task+type

Designer
http://www.activiti.org/userguide/index.html#eclipseDesignerCustomizingPalette

Runtime
see paragraph : Configuring runtime execution of Custom Service Tasks in
http://www.activiti.org/userguide/index.html#eclipseDesignerCustomizingPalette

Regards
Martin

[trademak]

Hi Christophe,

We support a couple of "special" service task types like Mule and Camel tasks, and having a Java Service Provider service task type would be a nice addition to this. Yes it would be great if you can write and contribute this feature through a pull request. Let me know if you need anything from us.

Best regards,

[cdeneux]

Hi Tijs,

Great news. I will start now this feature. Should I create a JIRA issue for this feature ?

If I need to ask you something about the Activiti source code and its internal, how can I join you ? Through the forum 'developers' ?

Regards,
Christophe

[jbarrez]

> Should I create a JIRA issue for this feature ?

A pull request is more important 😉 But a jira issue is nice for the release notes.

Any forum here would do for questions, but the developers forum is indeed meant for engine code discussions