Erik Drolshammer skrev:
Trygve Laugstøl wrote:
I tried to look at OSWorkflow a while back and found it to be pretty
much not what we want. It is very user driven and it was very hard to
get it to work in a way that Continuum needed it to.
OSWorkflow is perfect for JIRA and the like, but not for server
applications. My current bet is on the stuff from JBoss. ODE seems to
be more on a BPEL level. ServiceMix used to have something for
Java-based workflow composition (bean flow was it?) that looked pretty
much what I was looking for at that time.
I used OSWorkflow on my previous project. Some comments:
1. The book on OSWorkflow [1] is terrible, the online docs are worse
Definitely.
2. It works pretty well, but it is really low level. E.g. it does not
natively support loops, so this kind of functionality you must implement
yourself.
Right, this is because you end up using pre and post actions to do the
routing.
3. It can definitively be used to do what you want, but it is not easy.
I don't know any better products though.
We evaluated JBoss Drools before choosing OSWorkflow, which worked well,
but was not suited for our use case. I think it was that it was more
useful as a rule engine than a general workflow-engine. If its features
are what you want, Drools seems to be a good product.
I mean jBPM[1], not Drools. One important aspect of using a proper
workflow engine is to make the workflows pluggable so either downstream
and/or users can customize the behaviour. Possibly even compose their
own workflows with pieces of Continuum.
[1]: http://labs.jboss.com/jbossjbpm/
--
Trygve
