The web application needs some serious work. And most of the things that people want to contribute are related to the webapp. That's a great combination ! :-)
So the only thing I want to make sure is that we can effectively combine all these efforts to get a nice result.
First, i want to give you a high level overview of how we see the future of the webapp:
* webapp split: we want to split up the web application into 2 distinct web applications.
One webapp for process participants (task forms, monitoring and BAM) depending on the user's privileges, monitoring and BAM will be available or hidden (see next bullet on JAAS based security).
Second webapp for administration functions. That is a separate webapp that also requires the admin role.
* JAAS based security: Now, security is very primitive to keep it simple. But we want a better evolution path for the webapp to be used in production environments. Also we think that currently, the knowledge on JAAS based security is wide enough spread so that such a dependency would not scare people away from the jbpm webapp. We will have to point people to the JAAS configurations once and a while...
I think we should have 3 roles: user, manager and admin. User and manager should be 2 roles for the process participant web application. The admin role should give access to the Administration web application.
* componentization: We plan to package the building blocks of the webapplication as reusable JSF UI components. Candidates are : the task list, the list of process definitions you can start, the task form, ... One of the main objectives of creating these components is that this will be the reuse done between the plain webapplication and using jBPM in a portal.
I'll put some work in jira to reflect this as good as possible. There is not really a schedule for these big reworks.
regards, tom.