For anyone looking into this it might be helpful to keep in mind that
OSWorkflow is VERY different from the ECA rules in OFBiz and is also very
different (rather less different though) from a WfMC style workflow engine
which includes both Shark and the old OFBiz Workflow Engine.
For anyone wondering how this affects things in the future in OFBiz, it will
depend totally on where people find it to be helpful. For many things, even
very custom things, that we've done we have found that a workflow engine just
doesn't end up helping a whole lot when you are doing custom application that
require special management of automated and manual work. You end up having to
create custom screens and map everything in the workflow to other entities in
the data model anyway, and it's usually less code and work initially and over
time, and WAY more flexible, to just do that with the other tools in OFBiz
rather than having a centralized work management piece. There are of course
exceptions to this, but in general the changes that are often needed over time
don't always match up well with the changes that a tool like this will
facilitate. In short, having tried many of these tools for similar problems I
haven't seen a huge win with a workflow engine yet.
-David
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Anthony,
Thanks for this. Having an usable alternative to ECA sounds good to me.
Nice to know, by the way, that the Jira team uses OSWorkflow in their
work. Does someone know more about that ?
I'm sure I'm not the only one looking forward for your work !
Jacques
De : "Anthony Enrione" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi Jacques,
Yes i would like to get it into Ofbiz. I will keep you all posted on
my
progress. When we have completed the integration i will produce a
patch
file. It's a nice workflow engine because it's small a compact and i
think that it would be a good fit for Ofbiz.
Anthony.
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Anthony,
Do you think about integrating OSWorkflow in OFBiz ?
Jacques
De : "Anthony Enrione" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Jacques,
Thanks for the reply.
We had a look at using the eventing mechanisms in Ofbiz but found
it
hard to create complex workflows, especially workflows that need to
make
decisions or persist state. We had a look at Shark and found it a
little
on the heavy side.
Just to let you know...
After having evaluated a number of workflow engines, we have
decided
to
go with OSWorkflow. It is small. The main workflow is done in a
single
Java class and it has a simple persistance interface. We found it
already has support for Ofbiz entities (perhaps this was added by
the
Jira developers as they use both OSWorkflow and the Ofbiz Entity
Engine?). I have been busy integrating OSWorkflow and adding
support
for
invoking Ofbiz Services. OSWorkflow makes use of Quartz to do the
scheduling but it was very easy to replace this with the Ofbiz
scheduler.
Anthony.
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Anthony,
Quick answer.
The OFBIz workflow engine is normally deprecated by the Shark
workflow
engine (which was originally built on the top of th OFBiz workflow
engine).
However I guess that there are not a lot of persons using a
workflow
engine in OFBiz.
In a typical use of OFBiz (eCommerce for instance) most of the
workflow
job is currently done thru ECA mechanims (SECA for Services, EECA
for
Entities, MECA for mailing).
This is not to discourage you to use the existing workflow engines
in
OFBiz but to let you know that you will not find much support from
the
OFBiz community.
Jacques
De : "Anthony Enrione" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi all,
We are using Ofbiz to build an ecommerce site and i am currently
evaluating workflow engines. I have seen that Ofbiz has it's own
workflow engine which (from the source code) looks fairly
complete.
There is also support for the Ehydra Workflow engine. I have some
questions regarding the two:
What is the state of the internal workflow engine in Ofbiz? Is it
fully
functional? If not what areas need to be worked on?
Why was Ehydra chosen to replace the existing Workflow engine in
Ofbiz?
How well does it integrate with Ofbiz?
Does anybody have any experience of using either of the two
systems?
Any advice would be gratefully appreciated.
Anthony.
