Here’s what I want to do, develop some Business Process Management diagrams for the Content Management System at the Day Job from Hell. This is because I want to keep my place in Hell–assuming there are far worse Hells than this.
So what I need is a BPM modeler that runs on OS X and is free. As in beer. I’ve been toiling away with the trial version of OmniGraffle, but it only gives you the ability to manipulate 20 objects. A little limited.
The first thing I learn is that a query for BPM + Mac OS X typically returns software that counts Beats Per Minute. Feh.Â
After some searching I found a free BPM tool from Billfish Software. Despite the very cool presentation on their website, and the eye-candy on their UI, I couldn’t get the tool to run. I also had to submit all my contact information in order to download the software…so I’m expecting a sales call. Undoubtedly I will have forgotten all about Billfish by the time the rep calls.
My next stab was to try and install the Tibco Business Studio, which is where I probably should have started in the first place seeing that my company has a license for iProcess and we have intentions of using this tool to drive workflows in our CMS.
Tibco Business Studio comes in two flavors, Linux and Windows. I tried installing the Linux download on OS X using terminal commands. No go. It returned an OS conflict error.Â
My next attempt was to get Business Studio running under Eclipse. The trick is to install Business Studio on a Windows machine and copy the Features and Plugins into the Eclipse installation (as described in a cached conversation in Google.) Problem is that Tibco Business Studio (TBS from here on) wouldn’t install under Virtual Windows on an iMac G5 that I use for legacy processing.Â
Plan C. Install TBS Linux on Ubuntu running in Sun’s VirtualBox. This was a fairly straightforward installation, albeit time-consuming seeing that I just want to model a couple of workflows. This is just plain nuts. But maybe I’ll make more use of the tool in the future.
After that it was a trick to get TBS to install in Ubuntu, again some terminal commands that I found in a cached forum somewhere. I can’t remember.
Now here’s the problem with running TBS in Ubuntu on VirtualBox–the screen resolution is set to 800×600 which is dang tiny. I spent a half hour trying to big-ify the window with no luck.Â
Plan D. Copy Features and Plugins from VirtualBox and install them on Eclipse and run native on the Mac.
You would think it would be a simple mater of creating a shared folder between the Virtual Machine and the host. I struggled with this for another 30 minutes, before giving up and trying to email the folders to myself. Fail. Finally I made a connection to my MobileMe account using Firefox and uploaded the folders there.
Success. Almost. I got TBS running under Eclipse…only to find that objects won’t link to each other. More fail.
So more struggle to find out how to increase screen resolution for Ubuntu on Virtual Box. The trick is fairly simple–install Guest Additions in Ubuntu through the VirtualBox interface. What the instructions didn’t make clear to me is that this would mount a CDROM image in the Ubuntu window. Plus the linked instructions were for a different iteration of the Linux Guest Additions, so I couldn’t follow the terminal commands exactly, having to do a sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run instead.
So now my window is bigified and I can run TBS on Ubuntu. And that’s how my day went. How about yours?