Thanks for your post Kenneth, it's great to see such enthusiasm!
I have worked with commercial BPM engines (.NET), and no matter what
they say ("drag and drop to work", "no programming needed", "intuitive
interface", etc.), there is always a lot of work involved getting
anything to work. Even with paid maintenance and support, you still
need to do all the work and then chase help desk tickets for days or
weeks. And... you rarely see the enthusiasm seen in the Ruote
community.
Having said that, I will have to convince my stakeholders that this is
the way to go. With the examples you gave me, plus the six-months-ago
census, I think I have a good chance of getting through.
I will be putting more time into playing with Ruote next few weeks
(now looking into Ruote-rest).
I hope more community members outside the core team will share their
stories, the more the merrier!
Kind regards,
Peter
On Jun 24, 1:08 pm, Kenneth Kalmer <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Peter Dalmaris
> <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hello,
>
> Hi Peter
>
> > we are preparing to start work on an application that will heavily
> > depend on a workflow engine. This engine will need to handle a dozen
> > workflows, around 50 users, route workitems through email and web.
>
> Congrats on choosing a WFE and not a state machine.
>
> > I have been looking into Ruote for a while now, but finally got
> > serious a couple of days ago. Since then, I have installed ruote-web2,
> > created a simple workflow definition and installed it, added users and
> > groups, ran the workflow; it all seems to work fine.
>
> > However, I am not convinced yet that Ruote is the way to go. I would
> > be very interested to hear relevant stories from the members of this
> > group. Descriptions of production applications build with Ruote,
> > successes and failures, arguments for or against this solution, words
> > of wisdom etc.
>
> Be prepared to work. This is my only advice. John Mettraux is an awesome
> lead dev, very willing to help, but expects you to be helpful too, which I
> totally respect and has made me earn his respect in a big way... There is no
> spoon feeding in these parts.
>
> Now, here is the long and the short of it from my side, take John's reply
> into perspective as well.
>
> * It took me several months to understand how ruote works, purely because I
> was inexperienced in BPM/WFE.
> * I couldn't care less about BPEL, BP.., Visio or any other 'standards for
> business'...
> * IT IS NOT A STATE MACHINE (but can be _reduced_ to act like one)
> * Write your own participant/listener, using others as a reference, it is a
> great learning curve.
> * Use ruote-rest, or upcoming ruote-kit, if you're ever planning on running
> more than one Rails instance
> * Be prepared for a lot of manual testing
> * Live in #ruote, it's a cozy little channel
> * Use sunscreen
>
> As for production use, we went live last week on a Rails + ruote-rest
> system. We have well over 200 human participants and about 30 autonomous
> participants (running on 9 different servers). The engine is running of a
> YAML filestore, and is holding up brilliantly. It has not been without
> issues, but 99% of the issues is a result of our own code and
> implementation, not the engine's.
>
> John noted that ruote 2.0 will "scale" better, and ruote-kit will be built
> to leverage these improvements.
>
> > I suppose any responses could be compiled into a Ruote "showcase".
>
> It is extremely difficult to compile a "showcase" without users giving away
> their business models. John and myself have been chatting on building some
> interesting workflows as samples, allowing us to show off various parts of
> the engine. As for a showcase, you can examine our company websites
> (http://www.inx.co.za&http://www.ispinabox.co.za) to get an idea of our
> wholesale ISP business, and everything we do is now powered by ruote...
>
> My best advice is to do your homework, I don't wanna scare you off the
> project. I love it, it is an amazing piece of work. 1 year on I'm still
> learning new things about it every single day. My processes are getting
> leaner and faster, my participants are improving constantly and I bask in
> the rays of greatness. If ruote fits, wear it, you'll regret it at first and
> love it a few weeks later!
>
> Best
>
> --
> Kenneth Kalmer
> [email protected]http://opensourcery.co.za
> @kennethkalmer
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