Although the BPEL Monitor provides a technical user with the process status information this may be too detailed for someone within the business who may be interested in the progress of information through the system and therefore we need to consider an alternative view of the business processes that would be useful to a none technical user. To facilitate this I have leveraged some of the extended functionality available within the BpelSvgGenerator.jar file that allows for the replacement of standard, minimised, icons to be modified for a specific activity. This blog details how to present your business processes in a business manner.

Technical

Business

(Yes this is the new McLaren MP4-12C and as close to one as I will come).

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Read the original article at The Crooked Stick

This is a quick blog entry the documents some new functionality (to help pre-sale) that allows the addition of new extended Icon Sets to an already deployed Monitor application. This assumes that you have the latest version of the war file installed (build date 13th November 2009 or later).

Adding New Icon Sets

With the latest release of the Monitor we are able to customise the Monitor Web Application by adding additional Icon Sets. Once added these Icons can be used instead of the standard shipped Icons. The following step show you how to this can be done:

1. Create an Icon Set of type .png and with the specific names used in the existing Icon Sets. To check you have this correct look in <glassfish domain>/applications/j2ee-modules/BPELMonitorWebApplication/resources/icons/openesb.
2. Create a sub directory of <glassfish domain>/applications/j2ee-modules/BPELMonitorWebApplication/resources/icons to contain your icons (myicons) and copy the icons into it.
3. Edit the <glassfish domain>/applications/j2ee-modules/BPELMonitorWebApplication/iconsets.properties file and add the following:
   
   myicons=My Icons Display Name (This is what will appear in the drop down)
   
   
4. Refresh the monitor page and choose your Icon Set.

Read the original article at The Crooked Stick

Following my previous blog entries on building an Open ESB BPEL Monitor I decided to bring it all together in this blog and provide a simple User Guide that describes the current features. This page will also be available from within the downloaded war file (assuming you can connect to the internet).
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Following on from my previous BPEL Monitoring Blog entries I have tweaked, yet again, the web application and some of the underlying SVG Generation code. These tweaks are relatively minor but hopefully provide the user with some useful additional functionality. A quick 5 minute video can be seen at the end of this blog to demonstrate the functionality now available.
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As mentioned in my previous entry "Extending the Template Based BPEL Document Generator" I would be looking at linking into Adjoovo Spaces as a source for extended BPEL annotation. Whilst looking into this option I decided that what I also needed was the ability to upload BPEL information to the various repositories I was working with and on further investingation decided to extend the NetBeans Module associated within the Documentation Generator (NetBeans Module for BPEL Documentation Generation) to include this functionality.

Because I have done more JDBC and LDAP programming than REST Web Services I decided that I would build the Adjoovo Spaces Upload Action first and this blog entry covers the additional functionality I created and how I accessed the Spaces using the REST API.

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Following a number of discussions with colleagues I have tweaked the BPEL Monitoring Web Page so that it is now an Ajax based solution and hence the page now only exists to layout the data. The functionality originally contained within the BpelSvgRetriever.java has been moved to one of a number of Servlets that will execute during the page display and periodically, as specified in the preferences, to refresh the screen. Once the servlet have executed, asynchronously, the the Ajax callbacks will update contents of the specified <div> blocks.

As a result of these changes the simple monitoring web application has become slicker and in the majority of browsers no longer flickers as a result of the refresh. In addition I have stripped the SVG Generating code out of the main Document generation jar resulting in a smaller packaged war file.

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Following on from my original blog entry "Graphical BPEL Monitoring and Usage Statistics" I have have update the SVG Generation jar as part of my "BPEL Documention" functionality. Therefore this short blog entry will take you through the updates to the interface by building a small lightweight jsp based monitoring application. This application is by no means complete but can be extended to add more functionality although with the upcoming release of the official BPEL Monitor you may want to wait for this.
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Following on from the original NetBeans Plugin (NetBeans Plugin For Template Based BPEL) I have extended to include the two new Documentation Generators described in:

• Extending the Template based BPEL Document Generator (with JDBC Storage).
• OpenDS Template based BPEL Document Generator.

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Following on from my previous blog entry (Template Based BPEL Document Generation) which described the Template Based BPEL Documentation Generator and briefly mention how it could be extended. This entry will take you through the steps of building a Simple OpenDS based document writer that will retrieve the process and activity information from a specified OpenDS Directory. Although this is a simple example it should, hopefully, show you how to write your own Documentation Writer by extending the existing functionality. As I gen the chance I hope to add additional Writers to the basic jar to leverage a variety of possible Data Stores (e.g. the Adjoovo Spaces REgiSTry, WebService Calls).
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Following on from my previous blog entry (Template Based BPEL Document Generation) which described the Template Based BPEL Documentation Generator and briefly mention how it could be extended. This entry will take you through the steps of building a Simple JDBC based document writer that will retrieve the process and activity information from a specified JDBC DataSource. Although this is a simple example it should, hopefully, show you how to write your own Documentation Writer by extending the existing functionality. As I gen the chance I hope to add additional Writers to the basic jar to leverage a variety of possible Data Stores (e.g. the Adjoovo Spaces REgiSTry, OpenDS, WebService Calls).
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As mentioned in my previous blog entry (Template Based BPEL Document Generation) I have integrated the functionality into NetBeans as a simple plug-in that provides an additional Right-Click option on BPEL Files. The actual NetBeans Plug-in download can be found on the NetBeans Plug-in Portal at "BPEL template based Document Generator" and consists of four separate module and library NBMs. The associated icons and document template that are required can be found on my previous blog entry.
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The current implementation of Open ESB provides the developer with the ability to generate pdf based reports for their BPEL processes. By its nature this functionality is restricted in what it can provided and often does not meet the projects requirements simply taking the documentation added to the the various BPEL activities and writing it out to a pdf whilst also generating a graphical representation of the BPEL that frequently does not fit into the document correctly.

Having discussed this with a some of our pre-sales representatives I decided to see what I could achieve and build a flexible template based alternative. Much of the code used within the generation process is based on the previous work I did generating SVG from BPEL but enhanced to improve performance and flexibility.

This first blog entry describes the command-line interface to generating the the BPEL Documentation whilst a subsequent entry will describe the NetBeans Plug-in I have built to proved the additional functional at a single click.
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As the final part of my WLM SE Trail I will be securing the previously built Visual Web Pack Application using OpenSSO and the previously configured OpenDS instance. The choice of Visual Web Pack is arbitrary and you could do the same with the ICEfaces implementation.

I will be simulating a multiple box deployment strategy for two reasons:

1. This is more likely to be a production type implementation.
2. It actually make configuration of OpenSSO easier.
   

This implementation will take you through the graphical implementation but you do have the option to configure OpenSSO using a number of scripts and XML files but these will not be discussed in this blog entry.[Read More]

Having recently been working with the current version of the Open ESB Component Development Kit (CDK) I decided to try and build the current Component Tool Kit Client GUI as a NetBeans Module that provided a number of extra project types. The functionality I provide is built upon the existing core CDK project templates and I hope will provide an alternative interface to the building Open ESB Components. Because I build upon the existing CDK templates I am currently restricted to the functionality that they provide and need to work within the restriction that it imposes.
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As a quick extension to my previous blog entries based around the Open ESB WLM SE and interfacing using your own IDE. In my examples Visual Web Pack and ICEFaces I have created a bare bones SoapUI Project that is based on the TaskCommon.wsdl. If you download this and tweak the URLs then you will be able to quickly test your deployments.

• SoapUI.
• TaskCommon SoapUI Project.

If you downloaded the WLM SE Component installer on or after the 9th March 2009 you will notice that the TaskCommon.wsdl has been changed from a concrete implementation to an abstract implementation and hence you will not be able use it directly without modifying the Composite Applications Service Assembly.

To allow remote access you will need to connect the TaskCommonPort to a SOAP BC as below and configure it as follows:

• Name : TaskCommonPort
• Binding : TaskCommonBinding
• soap:address : http://localhost:${HttpDefaultPort}/wfse/TaskCommon

Once configured you will be able to connect the SOAP UI Project.