Understanding Activiti Source

[bmarkmann]

Is there any guide to diving into the implementation of the Activiti engine itself?  I found the architecture snapshot on the wiki, which is somewhat helpful, but it would be nice to get a better understanding of what-happens-when and what-is-used-when within the architecture of the process engine (and related components).  Even just some general pointers would be helpful, and if I can wrap my head around it, I'd be happy to contribute some more comprehensive developer documentation…  Thanks!

- Bill

[bmarkmann]

Also, when I clone the git project and create a project from it in Eclipse, I run into a ton of errors about unknown references… are there any external compile-time dependencies that I need to import?  (I get the same basic problem whether I create a project from the master level or a project from the activiti-engine module…)

[martin_grofcik]

# clone and try to run mvn clean install first (dependencies and reports can be found here
http://www.activiti.org/community.html#maven.repository
http://www.activiti.org/userguide/#getting.started.including.libs

[bmarkmann]

That maven repository was in the pom.xml in the git repo, so not sure that was the problem.  The weird thing is that from the command line, Maven didn't seem to have any issues resolving all the dependencies and building everything – so seems like it's probably either an Eclipse- or m2eclipse-specific issue.

I was able to import the activiti-engine model in Eclipse (needed the bpmn-converter and bpmn-model modules also).  That's what I was looking for, so the rest isn't an issue at the moment.  I'll try again later to see if I can get the complete project (all modules) loaded.

[martin_grofcik]

try:
BackUp yor eclipse config (optional/recommended)

mvn eclipse:clean eclipse:eclipse -Pdistro

Command should delete **/.claspath **/.project files and generate new one. After that it should be possible to import project into eclipse easily. (Do not forget to specify M2_REPO variable.)

[bmarkmann]

I'm getting a NullPointerException when I try to import the project, with all the same dependency errors.  I think it might be my Eclipse installation (all sorts of stuff has become broken after I installed the Eclipse tools for Scala), so that might be it.  I'm really just interested in the engine code, so not really a big issue (like I said above, I can get that imported with two dependent modules).  I'll report back here if I get a further chance to debug this.  Thanks for your help!

- Bill