Re: [RT] Workflow

Brian Topping wrote:

> So I've been seriously MIA on staying current with Wyona or helping out, but
> thankfully it hasn't seemed to matter :-)  My apologies regardless.  


No problem


I had
> some misgivings about how I was building the system I am pulling together for
> my new company and decided to do it on EJB.  The detour took "a few" weeks
> longer than I had expected.  But it was worthwhile.  EJB seems to be one
> letter short of a swear word for many people, but it seems to be the best
> alternative to .NET.  As well, wrapping EJB with Web Services is pretty
> trivial.
> 
> I'm bringing this up because one of the things I've had a tough time with is
> how important something like a CMS is in an enterprise and how divergent the
> interfaces to access it are.  I guess JSR-170 will go a long way toward
> unifying the interfaces, even if nothing is done to make them remotely
> accessible.  In an ideal enterprise, there is no document that is published
> in an enterprise that is not a part of a CMS, hopefully a single CMS.  So
> things like XSL interfaces and JSP tags and Java interfaces and concurrent
> remote access and... all this needs to be considered and handled eventually
> if adoption is going to be universal.  And it needs to be accessible across a
> network from a separate JVM, somehow.
> 
> But what about workflow?  Isn't a single workflow engine almost more
> important?  It seems to me that I could have an enterprise with several
> heterogeneous CMS systems but still have them scripted by a single workflow
> engine.  It seems less functional to have several workflow engines, since the
> workflow engine is the source of the workflow scripts as well as the source
> of the events. 


Well, as an alternative the Workflow engines might be able to pass 
events (status) from one to the other engine.


 So the gravity of a workflow engine choice seems to be
> strong, right?  
> 
> There is a pretty good thread on ServerSide at
> http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=13800 about
> OpenSymphony's OSWorkflow.  Has anyone looked at it yet to understand why it
> could not work for the needs of Wyona? 


No, I haven't heard of it. I will have to take a look at it before I can
say anything about it. There was also a thread on workflow on the
Slide mailing list (plz see the mail from Stefan Michels).


 I would presume that has happened but
> there has not been the time to share the experiences yet.  But I think before
> OSWorkflow is discounted and another project started, consideration needs to
> be given two whether the difficulty in building a workflow engine that can be
> universally accessed is going to be harder than fixing the ones that already
> are.  When that is considered, fixing OSWorkflow whereever it might be broken
> seems to make more sense than rewriting it again.


yeah, we should certainly reuse other stuff.


> 
> One of the things that I like about the OpenSymphony stuff is their attention
> to being EJB compatible (but not required).  You'll notice in this thread
> that they only require a J2EE web container, but can take advantage of EJB
> when it exists.  Many people do not like EJB because of performance reasons,
> but many people did not like Java over C++ only four years ago.  Today, I
> can't imagine anyone considering using FastCGI for a new website.  Wyona
> should last longer than four years, and I think it will do that by having
> interfaces that are accessible throughout an organization that deploys it.
> EJB and .NET are the best ways of doing this today, and I don't think anyone
> here is going to say that we should be working on the latter.  Regardless,
> you can go either direction with OpenSymphony and it's probably a good thing
> to emulate in any project that hopes to get enterprise-wide traction.


To be honest, I don't have any experience with EJB and therefore can't 
say anything about it.

Having a workflow engine would certainly help us getting into an
enterprise level. Maybe you could write down (compile) some common 
thoughts and best practises about workflow and append it to the
already existing Wyona xdoc about Workflow. What do you think?

Thanks

Michael





> 
> "phone lines are open for your thoughts" :-)
> 
> -b
> 
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OSCOM - Open Source Content Management Conference
September 25th - 27th 2002, Berkeley, California
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