Welcome to the Graphical Process Designer

Flexible Editing of Graph Based Executable Languages

The Graphical Process Designer (GPD) is a set of plug-ins for Eclipse that make it possible to edit graph based executable languages. The initial purpose of the GPD was to represent jPDL processes graphically. When Seam started to use jBPM for page navigation, support for Seam pageflow was added. These two use cases made it apparent that the GPD has to be build up in such a way that it is be easy to add support for other graph based executable languages. Currently this is possible through the use of the standard Eclipse extension mechanism.

One of the strong elements of jPDL is that it is possible to extend the language by adding new node types. To accommodate the need to also add graphical support for these new node types a number of extension points were introduced. All the current node types are contributed to the jPDL plug-in using these extension points. In the same way a number of users have extended the GPD with their own custom node types to support a superset of the jPDL language graphically.

The GPD plays a crucial role in the jBPM vision of analist and developer collaboration. It features a graphical pane to edit the processes graphically and an xml source pane where the details can be read in XML. Also all the jPDL elements are supported graphically using the Eclipse tabbed properties view. Basically analists will only be interested in editing the jPDL graphically by drawing a minimal graph. After this developers can edit the process definition that the analist created and add technical details using the properties panes and the xml source pane. Look at the demo page to see the GPD in action.