Anyone created a RMI or Webservice call wrapper?

[falazar]

Hi All,

Before we got started in programming, I thought I would give a shout out and see if anyone had created a wrapper for either of these yet. The basic feedback I have gotten from various people was that it was possible to do, but noone had specificially done it yet.

If not we will try to have it done this week, but if so, any pointers would be great here, and save us some programming time.

Thanks,
James Ratcliff

[tom.baeyens]

here's the idea we had in mind:

create a SLSB that takes commands and then these commands are executed within a JbpmContext that is created in the SLSB.

a set of predefined commands include TokenSignalCommand, TaskInstanceEnd command, ...

then the SLSB would be exposed over a webservice. don't know yet how that would look like. especially how the commands themselves would be mapped. with JAXB ?

there are versions of the SLSB and the commands in HEAD of cvs. please, take a look there and comment on them. as we would like to make this a collaborative effort and make sure that as much requirements as possible are met with our design.

[kukeltje]

I'm working on one or at least will be on short notice. Heck, I even might have complete running functionality before the end of the month.

My ?0.02:
Do NOT use the SLSB, no need (imo) and it makes things NOT work on Tomcat. There is a company that wants a webservice frontend, but they just run Tomcat. Instead of using the/a SLSB, the commandexecutor can be used (not the thread, just the class). I just tried it and it works.

The mapping of the commands (creating an xsd for this) is a jira issue. The commands can be realy simple Most calls can even be just rpc type calls, very easy to generate.

Starting a process (just by name or with a version) was implemented in 1 minute (hour is more like it ;-) ) after I got the basics running. Other plain rpc type calls for ending a task (with or without variables, with or without a transitionname) is also not difficult. The thing is that there is no method overloading in wsdl (at least will not be supported in future versions afaik), so for starting a process I have two methods, startProcessLatestVersion (..) and startProcessSpecificVersion(..). Notr beautiful, since with the end task there will be numerous combinations (see also the jira, starting from http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBPM-718)

More complex things will be retrieving a tasklist, logging etc...

My preference is that someone defines a nice XSD and we map that to the command objects, extending those where needed. I'm not a fan of generating xsd's from java (although it did work with JBossWS generated wsdl/webservice and an the eclipse webservice explorer)