Hi Aaron, On 7/3/06, Aaron Hamid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi John, > > I posted a question regarding OpenWFE before (wow, is it really a > year) and have been keeping OpenWFE in mind. Perhaps I should more > formally introduce myself. I have been working in conjunction with > two other developers in Indiana University on an open source workflow > engine of theirs, for about a year now. This system has been in > production at IU for a while, and will most likely go into production > soon in several universities as it is a component (dependency) of a > large open source higher education financial system (kuali.org if you > are interested; unfortunately apparently down at this time). > This workflow engine has evolved iteratively/incrementally, and it > is strongly oriented towards simple approvals/document-based workflows > (think: purchase request, hire request, etc.). Now that Kuali has > gained a lot of traction and interest in several universities, there > is an increased interest in reusing the workflow for other > applications. I have been dedicated to working with IU to make their > engine more flexible, robust, and re-purposable.
Congrats ! > We have just released a minor dot-release, and are on the brink of > a major architectural re-evaluation. As part of that > evaluation/redesign, we intend to evaluate several technologies. I > personally am interested in evaluating partnering/joining with an > existing open source product, with existing tool support and user > community. You plan on dropping your existing workflow engine ? Ah, you're just looking for a free piece of advice ;-) > If you can spare the time, I would much appreciate your insight > into the workflow landscape in general, and also your vision for > OpenWFE. Workflow as a technology is still very early on the "hype" > curve. There have been products for years, but they seem to have been confined to big accounts. You might be interested by that book : http://jmettraux.wordpress.com/2006/05/17/activity-based-costing-a-hint/ (well there's a link to it in that blog post). > There is very little standardization and many variants. But > workflow also has tremendous promise in automating and making business > processes more efficient. > As far as standards, the "800 pound gorilla" is BEPL. BPEL ? > For example, > Oracle (after many acquisitions) has redesigned its product line and > made BEPL core to its "Enterprise Service Bus". They are replacing > their standalone workflow product, with BEPL in the core bus. BEPL > itself is not sufficient for workflow, so there are proprietary > add-ons to make this work. I believe IBM has proposed "BEPL4People" > extension for BEPL to extend BEPL to allow interaction with humans. > There are also other extensions/variants such as BPEL4J and > subprocesses. However, as can be expected, BEPL is complicated, > verbose, will require lots of tool support to be usable by end-users, > and ultimately it is not yet clear whether the impedance mismatch > between BEPL and workflow is really worth it. Indeed, a BPEL process definition is unreadable (for the greatest joy of tool vendors)... > One BEPL-based workflow contender is Intalio's open source PXE > engine (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pxe); they claim they will be > implementing BEPL4People, and creating a true workflow system. What's a true workflow system ? > PXE is > apparently being adopted by Apache, Intalio donated it to Apache and they actively support it. It will certainly emerge the 'incubation' state contrary to previous BPEL donated to the Apache foundation. There's one funny thing : someone named 'pxe' made a donation to OpenWFE at the beginning of 2005. > into one or more Apache products > (Ode?), as well as ServiceMix. It is also able to be integrated with > the MULE enterprise service bus, another product we have been looking at. The guys behind Intalio do grok BPM / workflow (http://itredux.com) But it doesn't feel like Open Source, it's commercial open source (I hate the 'community edition' term, it's so hypocritical (lots of companies do that know)). > Yet another specification is SCXML (State Chart XML, > http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-scxml-20050705/ ) which is a high level > programming specification similar (although much simpler) to BEPL, and > akin to the custom workflow languages of any number of workflow > engines, e.g. OpenWFE. Apparently Apache already has an > implementation (http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/scxml/), although I > have not yet evaluated it. I just had a quick glance at it, looks like jBpm. I don't like graph based stuff, the real stuff is 'process calculus'. > In light of the surplus of specifications and workflow > implementations, and the relative immaturity of the field, I wonder > what your opinion is on the field of workflow in general, and what > direction would you like to take OpenWFE (I see a couple of > partnerships on the main page). > Do you see some standard(s) emerging > that OpenWFE will ultimately adopt? Or are these specifications not > worth it at this point? On casual examination it seems like OpenWFE > has a large user-base... Wouldn't you first explain your own strategy at first ? > could you characterize this user base at all? > Any educational institutions that you are aware of...? The user base is very heterogeneous : people use OpenWFE for tasks I'd never thought about. But well, after all, it's a business process engine and there are all kind of businesses. Yes, there are educational institutions using OpenWFE. > Thank you for your time, I look forward to your feedback! Best regards, read you in one year. -- John Mettraux -///- http://jmettraux.openwfe.org Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ OpenWFE - Open source WorkFlow Engine OpenWFE-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openwfe-users
