I think better approach would be Apache ode project.
On May 21, 2007, at 1:29 PM, Anthony Enrione wrote:
Hi Shi,
We did have a look at jbpm but it's persistance is intricately tied
to Hibernate so would not be a good fit. It also has it's own
scheduler as well.
Anthony.
Shi Yusen wrote:
Hi Anthony,
I recommend jbpm. Please do think about it.
Shi Yusen/Beijing Langhua Ltd.
在 2007-05-18五的 11:05 +0100，Anthony Enrione写道：
Hi All,
When we have integrated it, i will write up a document with some
examples so that you can take a look at what it offers. We have
refactored the OSWorkflow component quite a bit as well to make
it simpler to use.
Anthony.
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Thanks for feedback David,
Yes only future will tell, past did already. I pretty sure you
are right
: experience tells.
Actually, I'm not specially a workflow big fan, and ECA have proven
their usefulness. Nevertheless, I wonder what would appear from
OSWorkflow in OFBiz in
some areas.
In general, I don't like to close doors (or not open them
rather) before
being sure there are nothing interesting behing them, live is so
short !
My father always told me : "L'experience d'autrui ne profite
jamais", he
was right !
A bit digressive sorry :o)
Jacques
----- Message d'origine ----- >
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.
Pagarbiai,
Aivaras Liutvinas
UAB "Patikimi Sprendimai"
Akademijos g. 2, Vilnius
IT inžinierius
Tel.: +37061213423
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
