IE polyfills BPM way

Posted on 2019/07/19 by andy

Some organizations still cannot shrug Internet Explorer (IE) off their IT standards. Combine it with user interface of IBM BPM based on Javascript and your development falls back to coding practices in early 2000’s. Surely there are ways to fill the gaps with polyfills and shims, the question is how do do it neatly in BPM. Let’s see! Continue reading →

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Ramblings on Nivona 7-series coffee machine

Posted on 2019/06/22 by andy

It’s been few months from my last post so I needed some lightweight subject to warm up. I have chosen to collect a bunch of free thoughts and impressions over Nivona 7-series coffee machine after nearly a year of home usage. It is far from fulln blow review, so if you are looking for such one then carry on with searching. If you want see however what reviews usually do not bother to look at, like engineer’s perspective on this appliance, then you are in right place.

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WebPD opened editors limit modification

Posted on 2018/11/13 by andy

IDE environment in IBM BPM migrated from Eclipse-based app to WebPD, a web-based process editor. WebPD built on top of IBM BPM Coach Framework, based on dojo toolkit, hosting complex visual editors suffers from performance and stability issues. It can simply reload itself mid your work (because of some internal broken assertion), editor can stuck and manual reload is needed etc. The more artifacts opened the less stable it is. To limit resource consumption and countermeasure poor experience IBM introduced limit of 10 simultaneously opened artifacts. Fine. Unless you run BPM debug session that opens dozen of nested artifacts and fails badly. Then either you stay out of luck or you hack it this way. Continue reading →

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Bumpy ride: webworkers, IE11 and BPM

Posted on 2018/10/19 by andy

Internet Explorer – a black sheep amongst browsers – should be forgotten long ago, yet it stands strong as a standard in many organizations. And while its last incarnation (IE11) adopted some modern web technologies it still offers lurking traps ready to ruin your day. Consider allegedly supported webworkers: when created from Blob IE11 cannot load any resources via XHR and when attempted to be created from separate JS file, IE11 will fail with specfic response headers. All these gotchas combined with headaches of IBM BPM got me to tipping point for sharing my thoughs here. Continue reading →

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Coach validation errors in one place

Posted on 2018/07/27 by andy

Imagine you want to see all IBM BPM coach validation errors in one place. By default after validation phase you need to find all invalidated widgets one by one, changing tab or opening accordions, and so on. Coach framework does not give any programmatic tool to get all validation messages from inside of coach view. While SPARK / BPMUI library gives some helper functions it does not cover all cases. Here I discuss simple way to plug-in to (or hack) coach engine and SPARK library to collect all validations at once. Continue reading →

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Chinese LED bulbs fail

Posted on 2018/02/18 by andy

Some time ago I have replaced most of light bulbs with LED bulbs. Typically these imported directly from China were significanlty cheaper so that I gave them a try. LED diodes can work thousands of hours without an issue, right? Unfortunatelly not in this case. Less then hundred workhours later one by another started flickering just to stop turning on soon after that. Each LEDs bulb stopped due to burnt LED. I tried not to give up for really long time. Until another broken LED last week.
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Stinging Mac

Posted on 2018/02/01 by andy

For a long time I was ignoring that tingling feeling where my forearm was touching Macbook while typing on second laptop. Sensation that was sometimes closer to stinging, as if tiny hair was pulled of my skin. It happen at home, in the office, just from time to time. Always when bare skin was laying down on aluminum casing of Mac. When I finally realized it happens always when Mac is plugged thru adapter to mains I took closer look. Does Macbook Air 2012 suffer from grounding issues giving me some noticeable residual AC voltage enough to irritate the skin? Continue reading →

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Magic smoke out of fridge

Posted on 2018/01/22 by andy

When fridge got me popping sound and display turned black, I realized that 10 years old Whirlpool went out of service. My “damn it” comment was quickly followed by my wife: “You are going abroad next week! What we do now?”.  Considering subtle smell of magic smoke I felt next to fridge’s back, I knew any repair shop will simply get me new control module, and these are overpriced, sometimes nearly 1/3 of appliance cost. The choice was easy: fix it or get a new fridge, next day.

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Trap in BPM new event handler editor

Posted on 2017/09/14 by andy

Early 2017 cumulative fix for IBM BPM 8.5.7 brought new section in properties for coach views configuration – events tab. This looks like a wink at SPARK toolkit being integrated with BPM product. SPARK introduced nice concept of configuration options storing Javascript code created outside of coach views, events code as one of them. Configuration option was limited to one line string however. New editor in events tab is multi-line with code coloring. It has also nasty trap for young players though, let’s take a look. Continue reading →

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Like father like son

Posted on 2017/09/04 by andy

It is easy to notice that for last ten months I was away from my blog. There is a growing reason for it: my little fellow. For first few months after birth of Jackie I could split time between family, work and hobby. His recent addiction to whatever dad hides from me effectively keeps me away from workbench. Continue reading →

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