There's no formal theory behind it... it's basically a finite-state
machine with the ability to hook together branching and decision
logic. The Workflow class itself provides a pretty good overview of
the different parts, but in a nutshell a workflow is composed of
Decisions and Tasks (both implement the Step interface). Both
Decisions and Tasks can have Outcomes; depending on the Outcome, a
previously-assigned next step executes.
Right now, JSPWiki only uses the workflow package in two places: for
saving wiki pages (in PageManager) and creating user profiles (in
UserManager). It's an extremely generic package that isn't really
dependent on JSPWiki at all.
Andrew
On Jun 23, 2008, at 11:08 AM, Florian Holeczek wrote:
Hi Andrew,
1) What does this group think about workflow persistence as a JSPWiki
feature? Do we need it? (I think we do...)
Sure! I didn't have the time to have a look at the workflow API yet,
but I implicitly expected the implementation to persist it.
BTW, is there a specific formal theory the workflows are based on,
e.g. Petri nets or activity nets? Or is it a more or less simple
document based workflow?
Regards,
Florian
