Re: Workflow Management

[Dan Connelly]

Alex:

You need to look at the Jakarta Commons Sandbox components to see what is
going on wiht our workflow.

Craig McClanahan is actively developing the Struts-independent part of
Workflow in that venue.

The Struts-specific workflow has not begun yet, as far as I know.   The
Commons development is a general purpose workflow engine.   The Struts
integration comes later.   Also, the Sandbox code is pre-Proposal.Its
good code, but very early.  Much may change going forward.

Craig's insights are, as always, quite excellent.   However, the
implementation has a long way to go, so don't count on using it tomorrow.

The Craig's Commons Workflow is scripted workflow, XML as the scripting
language.   He feels that scripts are better glue than Java code for the
composition of existing applications into super-applications.

However, in my opinion, there is more to the script approach than just ease
of programming.  The advantage of scripting for workflow is that the script
(and some context info) can be migrated over a wide network.   A central
database cannot.   Database-driven workflow is a bad idea for workflow.

Bacic Messaging servers, like MSFT Exchange and IBM Lotus Note, give you
workflow of a sort.  Adding scripted workflow to this is not new.   For
instance,  CDO in Exchange Server.   And, now there is BizTalk.

WebApp workflow has failed so far, in my opinion, because there wasn't
enough Messaging support..  There is resistance to Messaging from the object
purists who feel that an object can be as mobile as a Message.The battle
is over the infrastructure.

The more scripting, the more Messaging, or so it seems to me.   You must be
able to migrate seamlessly from the push-world of SMTP to the pull-world of
HTTP without noticing the transition.   We aren't there yet.  And Struts is
only part of the answer.   (By the way, NNTP is a nice compromise, but it
needs to be reinvented.)

Stay tuned.

Dan Connelly




- Original Message -
From: Alex Ross [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 10:59 PM
Subject: Workflow Management


 I started working on a Workflow Management system when I recently
discovered
 Struts along with its Workflow Proposal and saw *too* many similarities
for
 me to plod ahead on my own. :)

 Our current model is largely database-driven, focusing on the business
 process / activity level, and I'd like to try to bring it into the Struts
 framework. Is anyone actively working on the Workflow piece or looking to
 exchange ideas?

 Warm Regards,
 Alex

Forwarding Actions onto other Actions

[Bob Rullo]

This is my first posting to the dev board so bare with me.

From what I've seen in looking in the ActionServlet code it appears that
everytime a action is called the form instance for that action is placed
into the mapping.getScope( ).  Shouldn't there be a check before to see if
the ActionForm is already in the scope?  Reason being that one action could
make some modifications to a form instance and then forward it to another
action that will make more changes to the form instance.  Basically my
problem is that if two actions having the same form instance are called in
the same request the form instance stored in the request will always be
overridden by the last action.

I propose that we should do a check before each action to determine if the
form already exists in the desired scope.  If so, use the scoped instance,
if not, build the form instance off of the request parameters as it is now.

If this was by design, could someone shed some light to why?

Thank you for your help,
-Bob