StarPound Studio

Overview

StarPound Studio™ is a free open-source visual business process modeling tool that bridges the "communication gap" between business users and IT resources. It provides a collaborative environment for end-to-end modeling and configuration of business processes. StarPound Studio™ allows you to quickly build composite applications that run on the StarPound Application Server. Process and application models are deployed to the StarPound Server environment (running in your data center, or in the cloud) where they become live voice, web, or data services.


StarPound Studio™ is a tool that helps business and IT collaborate, model, and configure business processes and the corresponding user interfaces. Deployed as an Eclipse plug-in, StarPound Studio™ includes a business process modeling palette based on the BPMN 1.0 standard and palettes for modeling web-based user interface flows and voice interactions (i.e., voice self service applications). StarPound Studio™ is provided under a free license, enabling business users to model a company's processes, including human-to-human workflow, human-to-system integration, and system-to-system orchestration.

With StarPound Studio™, you model what the application does, not how it is built. We call this a Platform Independent Model, or PIM.  By capturing the bare essentials of what the application does, not how it is implemented, specification models are fast to create and easy to maintain. Typical modeling techniques focus on modeling an application's implementation. These techniques require a model element for each element in the implementation. This results in complex models that are cluttered with technical detail. Implementation models are difficult to understand and maintain, and their usefulness is questionable. That's why so few model their software before they build it.

Benefits

Unique benefits of StarPound Studio™ include:

  • Freely available - reducing costs for development and deployment
  • Provides an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface for application modeling
  • Extends BPMN to support skills-based routing of work and communications
  • Provides data management using Business Data Documents and web services
  • Models the web-based screens that support a business process
  • Built on top of the immensely popular open-source Eclipse IDE

Features

StarPound Studio™'s features include:

  • Built on top of the immensely popular Eclipse IDE
  • Generates BPMN compliant process models
  • Multi-channel Interface Flow modeling via plug-in palettes
    • Web (JSF)
    • Voice (VXML)
  • Business Data Documents
    • XML Schema
    • .xsd Import
  • Web Services
    • Enterprise Web Services Orchestration.wsd Import
    • Synchronous and Asynchronous
    • Support for SOAP and REST
  • Skills-based routing for enterprise work distribution
    • Synchronous work
      • Phone
      • Collaboration
      • Chat
    • Asynchronous work
      • Process tasks
      • Web Forms
      • Email
      • FAX
  • One-click model deployment
  • Seamless access to the StarPound API

StarPound application models include:

  • Web form tasks
  • Voice tasks (e.g. Tell prompts, Ask prompts)
  • Web service tasks (e.g. Call, Send, Receive, external web services, etc.)
  • Database tasks (e.g. Select, Insert, Update, Delete)
  • Call control tasks (e.g. Make Call, Conference, Transfer)
  • Script tasks
  • Gateways (AND, OR, XOR)
  • Events (Exceptions, Timers)

Requirements

StarPound Studio is built as a plugin to the incredibly popular Eclipse IDE.   Please consult the Eclipse documentation for destop system requirements. We make two downloads available through this website: a complete bundle, which includes Eclipse, as well as a separate download which provides just the plugin.

Availability

StarPound Studio is bundled with StarPound CORE, and is distributed via SourceForge.