Windows Store Apps Training

As part of my ongoing certification I recently achieved the Microsoft Solutions Developer Windows Store Apps using HTML5 certification.

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I am now entitled to deliver the official trainings from the Microsoft Official Curriculum such as:

Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS
Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 and JavaScript
Advanced Windows Store App Development Using HTML5 and JavaScript

If you are not sure whether Windows App development is the right thing for you or if you just want to get a feeling for the tooling, technologies and the development process you should attend my Windows Store Apps development workshop which is offered as in-house training.
Windows Apps will soon be availabe on most office workstations. Learning how to develop it is a great opportunity to be at the fore front to deliver compelling user experience. Don’t miss it! 😉

Agile Games Released

Today my Windows 8 app Agile Games passed the Microsoft certification process. It is now available in the Windows Store.

Planning

The app acts a a host of typical games that are utilized in agile projects. The first game is planning poker which can be now played by distributed teams over the internet. Other games will be added to upcoming versions. I implemented the app using HTML5/CSS/JavaScript and jQuery. The backend is based on HTML Web Sockets and hosted on Windows Azure cloud infrastructure. Although in my personal opinion XAML/C# is more productive than HTML/JS, I must admit that app development with HTML/JS is great fun. Existing techniques and frameworks such as jQuery or Knockout can be used and the JavaScript code has a high potential of reuse in different environments and across platforms. The WinJS APIs allow a smooth integration to use Windows functionality such as search and sharing. And last but not least the touch interface lifts the user experience to the next level.
If you want to know to develop how those apps, please attend the Windows Store App Development Workshop. I think Windows Apps have a great potential. They are well suited to reach users in a modern way. Most business workstations today are equipped with Windows so the market is huge. Let’s start coding!

Create Interactive BPMN Models Using JavaScript

In this tutorial I would like to show how to visualize BPMN files in a web browser.
All we need is jQuery for easy DOM navigation, XMLJS to parse the BPMN file and Raphael to visualize it. Since BPMN version 2.0 the BPMN XML file contains additional diagram interchange information. This information together with the actual process data can be used to draw process diagrams from the XML with little effort.

Step 1: Create the process
First we create a simple BPMN2.0 process like the one below using our tool of choice. In this case it was created with Signavio Modeler.

If we open the bpmn file in a text editor it looks like this:

What we see is that in addition to the actual process information it contains elements named BPMNShape and BPMNEdge. BPMNShape contains the bounds of the shape whereas BPMNEdge contains the path of the respective shape connector. This is the diagram interchange format which specifies the size and location of the graphical elements and paths.

Step 2: Prepare the HTML page
We need a simple HTML page that loads the required scripts for jQuery, XMLJS, Raphael and of course our own script bpmnjs.js.

The textarea element (line 20) contains the BPMN data. It is omitted here for the sake of readability.
The div element (line 23) specifies the drawing area that is needed to output the graphics.
Both are needed to initialize BPMNJS in the document ready event (line 14-15).

Step 3: Parse the DI elements using XMLJS
The following listing shows the parsing loop for the BPMN shapes within the plot function of BPMNJS.

First the XMLJS dom parser is initialized (line 49-51). The bpmndi namespace is determined in the getNamespaces function at line 54. Line 57 obtains all shapes. The rest of the listing iterates over the shapes, gets positions, sizes and bpmnElement-ids of the related BPMN elements and passes them to the paintShape function which performs the painting. The parsing loop for the edges is almost identical. The simplest possible paintShape implementation would look like the following.

The constructor function (lines 2-4) connects Raphael with our div and stores the Raphael instance in a variable called paper. The paper is used in the function paintShape which draws a simple rectangle using the given coordinates (line 8).
The result looks like this:

A few lines of JavaScript and we see the BPMN skeleton already. Not too bad.

Step 4: Find related process elements
In order to draw specific BPMN elements we have to determine the element type. The bpmnElement attribute that we have got in step 3 helps us to do that. We use it to get the process element by issuing an xPath expression on the DOM as you can see in the next listing (line 128).

The localName of the element is the name of the BPMN element an therefore the type such as startEvent. With this information we can implement a dispatcher to draw all BPMN elements individually (lines 130-133).

Step 5: Draw elements using Raphael and CSS
Raphael is a powerful JavaScript library that allows to paint graphical primitives easily.
The next listing shows an implementation to draw a basic BPMN task.

First the rectangle is painted (line 3) then the text is written onto the shape (lines 6-8). We can even apply CSS stylesheets to the shapes that allow very flexible customization without changing the JavaScript code (line 10). The function getCss determines the CSS class name. The simplest implementation just uses the elementType as CSS class name as you can see in the following CSS snippet.

After implementing some more type specific paint functions the result looks like this:

Step 6: Highlight paths
One of the advantages of painting the BPMN model at runtime over a static JPG like the one shown in step 1 is that it allows interactivity. For instance we could highlight the actual token flow in the model. To do that we need information about the executed BPMN steps. This can typically be obtained from a process tracking system which is part of almost every BPM product. To achieve highlighting we extend the getCss function to return a different class if the current shape is in the list of already executed steps.

We add the postfix -high to the CSS class in case the element should be highlighted. By specifying for example the class .task-high we can achieve highlighting for shapes and edges. The result is show below.

Step 7: Add interactivity
Finally we can even add interactivity to the model with a little help from Raphael.

As this can not be demonstrated using static images you can find an interactive version here. In this version you can hover over and click individual shapes to make them react.

Summary
With the help of jQuery, XMLJS, Raphael and less than 300 lines of JavaScript code, this blog post has shown how to create interactive BPMN models in your web browser. The complete demo can be downloaded here.

Web Service Security on BiPRO Day

BiPRO At the upcoming BiPRO day on 11.June 2013
I am going to give a presentation introducing the most important standards in the area of web service security. The aim is to show the purpose of the standards and how they work together to create secure and interoperable message based web service solutions.

About BiPRO day:
“Einmal im Jahr treffen sich die Mitglieder des BiPRO e.V. sowie Interessierte aus der Versicherungs- und Finanzdienstleistungsbranche zum BiPRO-Tag. Dabei stehen aktuelle und zukĂźnftige Themenfelder der Prozessoptimierung allgemein und des BiPRO e.V. im Speziellen im Vordergrund. Dazu zählen Vorträge und Präsentationen aus laufenden und bevorstehenden Projekten, die Vorstellung neuer Normen sowie Berichte Ăźber Norm-Implementierungen bei den Mitgliedsunternehmen des Vereins.”

Integrated Process Management with Open Source

If you ever tried to create an execution environment to automate business- or integration processes based on Open Source products, you know that this is not an easy task. Although Open Source products like Activiti or Apache Camel are of high quality, they do not run with production grade quality out-of-the-box. For serious usage scenarios typically a lot of work is required to integrate those products into a sound platform. This fact hinders companies to use those great products and turn to closed source alternatives from Oracle, Appian or Inubit, just to name a few.

Now there is an interesting alternative called oparo. oparo is an integrated process automation platform based on rock solid Open Source products. oparo is not limited to BPMN processes only. It rather focuses on the entire process spanning business, workflow, mediation and integration.

The platform does all the plumbing required to turn single products such as Activiti, Apache Camel, Apache ActiveMQ, Lucene/Solr, etc. into a platform that can be used out-of-the box. Even better, oparo is entirely ASF2.0 licensed (today and tomorrow) which offers broad usage options and does not involve any hidden costs for enterprise features.
oparo shields the process engineer (the guy who analyses and automates processes) as much as possible from low level technical tasks such as connecting and transforming Camel and Activiti message payloads. It offers a unified development approach for the process engineer to focus on business functionality instead of technical plumbing. Moreover it comprises additional valuable services such as process flow tracking, humantask integration or a registry. Due to oparos service binding approach, those services can be easily integrated in existing IT landscapes using almost any technology (e.g. .NET, JEE, HTML5/JS/CSS). The runtime is scalable (in terms of technology and licenses), the set up is automated and the whole platform is based on proven standards.

If that sounds promising, you can give it a try. You can find more information and a downloadable jumpstart distribution at oparo – the efficient process platform (German only)

New Workshop! Developing Modern User Interfaces Using WinRT

I am offering a new workshop that is dedicated to developing Windows Store Apps using WinRT and related technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XAML and C#. The workshop is intended for people who want to find out whether Windows Store Apps are a good option for your application development in addition to or instead of desktop/web application development. It takes 1 or 2 days depending on your needs and offers insights to the exiting world of Windows Store App development.

You can find more details here (German only).

HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist

As part of continuously maintaining my certifications, I passed the exam Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3.
Although a lot of developers think that JavaScript is a poor programming language compared to Java or C#, mainly due to it’s weak typing and limited IDE support, it is impressive to see what you can do with it. The main key to understanding is to abandon the notion that JavaScript is an OO language. The name JavaScript is really misleading as it implies that JavaScript is close to Java. But beside the curly braces there is not much common ground.

By passing the exam I achieved the additional certification Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist