i'm playing with the following idea to include in jbpm 4. i just present this idea here to get early feedback.
in various locations in jbpm, the dependency injection pattern was used. basic bean wiring is used in delegations (for including instantiation and configuration), for the overall jbpm configurations, for the services that separate jbpm from it's environment, ...
i want to bring all of these together in jbpm 4 and create one wiring mechanism for all of these.
if you look at the jbpm.cfg.xml, that is basically all wiring information on a jbpm-instance level. i think it makes sense to have similar configuration capabilities on process-definition, node and task level. probably all process elements would be able to benefit if you can just configure a hashmap of beans in that element.
this could be considered as a kind of metadata for the process, in the sense that it would be information that jbpm doesn't know about, but which makes sense to the jbpm user in that context.
once we're able to store this bean wiring information relative to all the process elements, that could very well be used for node configurations. so that we can add new node types without changing the db schema.
