expressFlow Engine Setup

The framework is mainly split up in two different parts:

1. The Designer - an Adobe Flex based Rich Internet Application
2. The Engine - a native Java workflow engine fully supported by the Google App Engine

The fastest way to get to your own working instance of the expressFlow framework is to download the engine first:

You need to make sure that the latest Google SDK is installed and you have access to your Google Account to create new applications. A very good starting point for Java development for the Google App Engine can be found here.

After downloading the engine, you need to fire up your Eclipse IDE.

Import the expressFlow Engine project into your workspace by File > Import.

Select Existing Projects into Workspace and hit Next.

Now you need to navigate to the location, where you saved the expressFlow Engine package. Select to import from an archive file and hit Finish. The expressFlow Engine project is being imported into your workspace.

After importing the project into your workspace the engine is built. This may take some time and might be the best time to get some coffee ;-)

When your Eclipse workspace is built successfully, you can start to deploy your new workflow engine in the Google Cloud! Let's go!

If you installed the Google SDK for Eclipse you should see an icon similar to the one below

It's time to click it! This starts the Deployment-Wizard to push the workflow engine to what it's made for: to the Google cloud.

The Wizard indicates that we need to provide the Google App Engine Application ID. You can manage your Applications by heading to the Admin Console.

Select the instance that is ready to accept the expressFlow workflow Engine and deploy it. Depending on your internet connection this takes some time.

After that you are done! The new expressFlow Workflow Engine instance is ready to serve requests and execute workflows in the cloud.

How do you get access to it? Well, let's take the demo-application: The Google App Engine ID of the demoapplication is elasticflow. That means, when we deployed the engine correctly to the elasticflow instance in the Google App Engine, the web-frontend is reachable at
http://elasticflow.appspot.com.

Enjoy modeling processes in the cloud!