Started: jBPM WS frontend

[kukeltje]

The past weekend (it is monday now, although only an hour) I
- Thought myself some jbossws things (Meaning it will ONLY be compatible with jboss 4.0.4-GA with jbossws-1.0.2.GA)
- Created a ws folder in jBPM cvs-head (only locally now)
- Set it up accoring to other jbpm folders.
- Learned (more then I ever want(ed) to know) about the jbpm build scripts (needs some tuning!!!!! including the eclipse .project file)
- added some libs to the paths
- Made some big mistakes (Why isn't it possible to instantiate this class... hmmmm.... after 3 hours I found out it was an interface :-( )

So now I have a clean environment to start implementing a ws frontend to jBPM in the following order:
1: startProcess(name) and startProcess(name,version)
2: signalToken(pid, transitionName)
3: endTask(pid, varHashMap) and endTask(pid, varHashMap, transitionName)
4: getTaskList(actorId)
- .....(suggestions)

1 and 2 will be finished this week, 3 and 4 a week later, but... since it is such a learning curve, it lacks testcases and will untill two weeks after I return from holiday (the first two weeks of september in Brazil)

Major questions:
- document/rpc type?
- JSR109 compliant?
- Other stacks?? (two on a system does not work and AXIS has more installed base on other appservers) JBossWS needs promotion...

[kukeltje]

hmmm.. it is late... pid in 2 and 3 should of course be tokenId and taskInstanceId

[aguizar]

My suggestions:

document/rpc type?

Document. Amenable to XS validation by the underlying stack, and faster to process than RPC. Web services are moving away from RPC.

JSR109 compliant?

Why not JSR-181? JSR-181 web services are so much easier to mantain. JDK 1.5 is a requisite, but most WS customers do not seem to have a problem with that. Do you require JDK 1.4.2 compatibility in your workplace?

Other stacks??

JSR-109 or JSR-181 already give you portability. They don't prescribe the use of a full J2EE app server. JBossWS can run on plain Tomcat thanks to the microcontainer. XFire also supports JSR-181. There is no reason to go out of our way to support non-standard deployment models.

[kukeltje]

- OK, Document it is (my preference to)
- Yep, JDK 1.4.2 compliancy (runs on Bea 8.1 for at least a year). Afaik, Tom wants to drop 1.4.2 compatibility in jBPM 4
- Agreed, I had no intention (anymore) to do AXIS

[tom.baeyens]

dropping 1.4.2 compatibility in jbpm 4 is an option, but still a question mark.