Hi Bernd,
thanks for the reply and the pointers. We like the business concept behind Cycle (different stakeholders using different artifacts, linking of artifacts, the “mini-social” network that automatically gets built around initiatives etc.). And, whereas BPM is an obvious area to use this (the model is an “obvious” part of a project that goes up and down between the business, development, operations etc.) Cycle has (we believe) potential for most types of software project as it gives nonintrusive loosely coupled “networking” of ideas from inception through to deployment.
That said, we want to have a closer look at the plugin API to find out how to extend it and get some know-how so that if we propose it to clients we can respond to the inevitable requests to do something specific that isn’t supported with the “out of the box” version (maybe they’ll want to connect to JIRA to pull in an Issue, or to a custom repository to pull out a document, or to a ticket management system such as Remedy etc. etc.). So we want to “play” with it to see how to extend it.
Another question (if I may) before I dig into the API docs and the source - Is it correct to say that Cycle has two main types of plugin – Connectors (to get access to artifacts and show them in the Artifact Browser) and plugins to “manipulate” artifacts (different views, actions on a single artifact available in the Work Area)? Perhaps there are other “classifications” of Plugins (for example maybe you can plug the security model to get access to user details from an existing LDAP etc.)?
Thanks,
Dara
