General

Is there any relation to the other project "Flow4J" on SourceForge?

The other project was the predecessor to this one, written as a standalone Swing application in the Nice programming language .

This project is a pure eclipse plugin written in Java. Thats why the SourceForge unix name "flow4jeclipse".

Installation

The Flow4J Plug-in is not loaded. What now?

Flow4J runs currently only with Eclipse 2.1.x and above, so also on 3.0.x and 3.1.x.

Check the following prerequisites:

  • Ensure that the GEF Plug-in is installed
  • Ensure that the Draw2D Plug-in is installed

Developing with FLow4J

Could you clarify the term "runtime" in Flow4J?

the word "runtime" is confusing there are two types of runtime classes:

  • flow4j runtime classes in the flow4jruntime.jar - It's written by me, it belongs to the flow4j framework. It contains the classes that are necessary for registering and executing flows. All in the package net.orthanc.flow4j.runtime . One mai n class here is the FlowManager
  • flow runtime classes - are generated by the plugin automatically after the user saves a flow model in the designer. This code contains calls to tasks (task flowlet) , if-then-else clauses (decision flowlet) , calls to other flows (call flowlets), jumps to other flows (jump flowlets) ...

    So these classes belong to the user's project and are i their packages. There flows are triggered/started with the help of the Flowmanager. Without the FlowManager you could not start flow's execution.

if you debug through a flow, then it becomes clear which parts are

  • from me: FlowManager and all others in the package net.orthanc.flow4j.runtime .
  • generated by the flow4j plugin: MyFlow.java, OtherFlow.java ...
  • generated by the user: ThisTask.java, OtherTask.java ...