A visual editor for language-independent scripting for BPMN modeling

This paper tackles a scripting problem associated with script tasks in BPMN modeling. Usually a BPMN process modeling tool provides a plain text editor without any assisting features for writing a script for a BPMN script task. This is not very convenient even for skilled programmers. There is also a limitation on exporting the script written in one language to different process modeling and execution runtimes that support other scripting languages. To provide easy-to-use and platform-independent scripting, we present a visual block programming editor for defining a visual script for a BPMN script task. The internal representation of the visual script is an XML-based business process script, or XBPScript, from which executable scripts for different target runtimes can be generated. This paper discusses, in particular, how the editor supports a complex function block that can be used in building a script. It also discusses, as an example, how to integrate the visual editor and XBPScript with open source business process management software. An evaluation of the visual editor productivity in comparison with plain text editing is presented.