Guido Casper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Hunsberger, Peter wrote:
For the end user I believe you always have to have modeling
tools for
building work flow, the internal implementation should be
completely
transparent; the first time I wrote GUI modeling tools for
work flow
was 13 years ago (as a subcontractor for one of the major work flow vendors) I don't believe the end user expectations have
declined since
then!
I'm slowly starting to see an unsolvable conflict :-)
Some are looking for a tool for developers and some are looking for a tool for users. And I guess we'll be having a hard time finding a single tool being both.
I probably should have written "For the end user I believe you always
have to have the option of having modeling tools for building work
flow...". However, even as written originally I don't see a conflict? I
think it's not unreasonable to assume that the modeling tools will be
independent of Cocoon.
What is needed is a way to take the models, where ever they may originate, and implement them in Cocoon. I think the only way that's going to be generally possible is if Cocoon has some form of template based model (even if it is internally used to generate a script based implementation via some XSLT).
As I see it, a user tool can only work within a limited context. The more you try to widen that context, the more the user tool starts resembling my development tool (with a UI still intended for end users) and things get messy.
If my state objects and my action objects both are Avalon components I can easily build really complex conditions and state transferring activities. I hardly see how these may be modelled in a user tool.
IMO modelling tools are great tools for communicating using models being reduced representations of the reality (isn't that what models are about?) but are usually hard to use to generate the reality out of the model.
I think it would be a good idea to talk about these two
-a user-oriented workflow tool with a modeling UI and a well defined limited context
-and a more flexible development tool
as separate implementations sharing the same interface.
WDYT?
Guido
--
Guido Casper
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