Forking the modeler

Hi,

in an earlier discussion about the modeler, we stated that we currently don’t have the resources to do so and that the Camunda Modeler works with Operaton for now. We have @paul working on the new Web UI fully, tying our Frontend and UX experience into one project.

That we had not put it on the roadmap ourselves does not mean, that we would be opposed to sbd. picking up work here and starting a fork of the Camunda Modler (or building a Desktop Application and Web modeler by themselves!). The earlier this is started, the earlier we have full authority over our roadmap and new features for the engine.

So this post could be seen as a call for participation, or a basis for discussion about a new modeler and BPMN renderer for Web apps.

What do you like about the current modeler, what do you disklike?

My thoughts on improving the modeler:

  • Check if the rendered SVG is accessible. If not, research on how to implement it with native HTML elements
  • Use tauri instead of electron for better native app experience
  • Make it deployable with the engine/web apps to integrate it and reduce reliance on third party hosting

The current modeler is quite good in regards to usability and performance. I think we should concentrate more on other topics, but make sure we stay compatible.
I also see this critical for users. They might want to stay using the tool they always did, and might not accept another which is less feature rich (for a while), or just different.

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As accessibility was mentioned earlier: This was recently addressed in bpmn.io: Make canvas selectable / keyboard binding implicit by nikku · Pull Request #662 · bpmn-io/diagram-js · GitHub

I found this project today GitHub - process-analytics/bpmn-visualization-js: A TypeScript library for visualizing process execution data on BPMN diagrams

It states in their readme: :sparkles: True opensource license without watermark display

So the base library for this has been already recreated

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That is very interesting, thank you for sharing. I’ll test it out with the new web apps soon.

And throwing some shade in the readme :palm_down_hand: :microphone: