As we transition to the new Hyland Community, some post links may be temporarily disrupted as we finalize redirects. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Details.
You should get hold of the ReadonlyProcessDefinition, find out what activity you want and get it (it's a PvmActivity, which allows you to inspect the transitions): http://forums.activiti.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1930&hilit=ReadonlyProcessDefinition
Not really sure why you need it… Expressions can only be evaluated when you are in activiti-context (eg. service-task, tasklistener) where you have access to a VariableScope. This object can be used to evaluate an expression, using the ExpressionManager (can be obtained through the ProcessEngineConfiguration, beware, it's internal stuff).