Installation: JDK incompatibilities and workspace conflicts

Intalio Designer and BPMS work nicely and smoothly.

Nevertheless, when it does not perform as expected, it is better to document it. I consider important to illustrate our experiences in this blog, and allow you to save time.

Yesterday one of my colleagues experienced a strange behavior with Intalio Designer… once again.

Problem #1

A few months ago, he could not even launch the Intalio infrastructure. No message was shown… how to deal with this? Well, the intalio forums gave him the solution: Intalio is compatible with JDK version 1.5 not with 1.6. This information appears in the correct place, but he was a bit too anxious to read all the information before installing. Please check the warning here.

Problem #2

The beast that challenged us yesterday is something different. The designer does not interpret the WSDL files as web services on the “Explorer Tab”…!!!
However, the same WSDL file appears OK on the Layout Tab… and you can even go through the Bindings, the Ports, the services…

When dragging and dropping the WSDL file into a pool, Designer asked whether implementations or invocations were required. Pretty much the normal behavior, but it did it for ALL the services, not for only one. I had to erase all the bad ones. The good one could not be correctly attached to a task via messages, because some problem blew out the translation to BPEL.

My colleague had already reinstalled several times during the last two months, obtaining each time some strange behavior from Designer. The only common element after each installation was that each time he found a number of projects already mapped in the Explorer Tab.

I was back in the city, so I could share his sufferings and give him a piece of my ignorance. He develops Java applications using Eclipse… (mmmhh)… The views that are normal in Eclipse appeared at the upper right corner of the IDE…(???)… something that does not happen in my environment.

A short diagnostic test showed that Intalio had mapped the workspace onto the same directory.

The solution? Just change the workspace (File->Switch Workspace) to a new directory, and relaunch Intalio Designer.
After importing the whole project from the old workspace (File->Import), everything worked correctly: I could finally drag and drop the services from the WSDL description.

The funny thing is that my colleague was the one who proposed the solution. Being a consultant, I have to ask the good questions; most solutions are IN you.

Hey! Do not try to import single elements of the project… it won’t work.

In general, you can trust Intalio forums for finding answers to many problems I’ll expose here. My goal is to follow a conversational style and give you contextual information from my experience; this is my grain of sand to the community. Nevertheless, Intalio Forums are THE reference. Please take into account that Intalio is actually two or more platforms and a philosophy of integration for the WHOLE enterprise. Thus, complexity is built in the forums. I hope this blog makes Intalio easier to understand to non-specialists.

A mortal’s guide to initiation

Intalio is a wonderful, robust solution that is incredibly lightweight… but it also has a personnality, even a strong character sometimes.

One of the common difficulties is to convince people that something like Intalio exists, that it works, and that is Open Source. Then, they’re ready to try, but there is no guide to follow. I’m a strong believer of constructivism but I’m also aware of the lack of time (or of patience) of experienced people. Therefore, I’d like first to avoid the frustration of others with Intalio.

My goal is to decode bit by bit, in just several hundred blog entries how to find your way and become an Illuminati of Intalio.

First of all, download the Intalio plaftorm. This normally requires registering onto their website. Just do it, and keep your password somewhere. I propose you to send yourself an e-mail with your password, using the same e-mail address that you used for registration. Then, you’ll find all Intalio-related information in the same place. Intalio people won’t annoy you and fill your Inbox; they will instead warn you 2-3 times per year if something important happens (new releases, a new feature like a screencast repository in their website).

You should download the Intalio Designer and the Intalio BPMS server. I’ll explain this better soon in another entry. Install them locally. They’re Java applications (mainly), so it should be straightforward to set them up and make them run on your machine.

In order to learn how to use it, please try to go through the Screencasts and Tutorials (basic) in the Intalio website. On the other side, you can suffer with me and follow the series of entries I will write; they are tagged as “Initiation” and/or “Start”. Just click on the Tag Cloud for finding out those articles. There will also be series on Project planning, Roles in the design of Business Processes, BP-Patterns, etc.

If you can, attend one of the courses taught by Intalio experts; the documentation given to you and the sharing of their expertise deserve the effort and the money. Besides, I guess Intalio follows the Enterprise 2.0 model, with the advantage of reactivity and tight links with their customers. The Intalio guys are really cool.

Later, try the Samples and the non-basic Tutorials. The forums are there to ask for questions. On this blog, I’ll try to focus on my daily experience with Intalio and give some hints on several issues related to the “Dark Side”