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[jwt-dev] Extending the JWT Editor with Extension Points?

Hi,

I want to make a suggestion of how to extend the JWT Modeler with vendor specific extensions. We talk yesterday to Florian Lautenbacher and Bernhard Bauer and discuss the possibility that we from Imixs use the JWT Editor in future to model Workflow Models for our "Imixs IX JEE Workflow Engine". The general requirement for us is that we need to model a lot of individual Informations/Attributes to each Activity inside the model. For example our engine supports a "IX Mail Module" which needs informations to generate a email during a transition. So now what I want to suggest is: Why not to use the concept of Eclipse extension points to extend the JWT Model itself? My idea is that a vendor should not only be able to use a predefined extension point inside the JWT Editor to add additional property pages to an activity object. But also a vendor can describe an individual model extensions using the same mechanism as used by eclipse to extend a plugin. So for example, if we form Imixs like to extend the JWT Editor with an additional property tab to describe the informations for our "IX Mail Module" we also add an XSD File to describe the structure of the data. The XSD File can be very similar to the XSD Files generated with the Eclipse Plugin IDE. In fact JWT can use the existing Eclipse XSD Editor concept for this. In the end the JWT Editor extends the model xml file itself with the additional structure for an activity as described in this XSD File or creates an additional separate Model File. The informations are provided by a property page from vendor specific plugin. Later on the IX Workflow Engine can parse the JWT Model file for specific extensions like the "IX Mail Extension". Another aspect of this concept is hat a user of the JWT Editor can switch on and off the extensions during modeling. So I can see and model using the Imixs extensions and in the next moment I switch off this extension and can see the natural model. Than I can switch on a extension from another vendor to see other aspects of the same model. This could be also a way to implement real round-trip-modelling.

What did you think about this?

best regards
ralph


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