On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:03 PM, viatropos <[email protected]> wrote: > > After about 3 days, I'm starting to get the sense that in Ruote (and > maybe workflow engines in general?), that you're actually running the > "business processes" as actually processes on the operating system. > Is that what you meant by an 'operating system for business > processes'? > > Having never dealt with, or even learned about, multithreading or > advanced processes (I've run the kill -9 process a few times, and > greped the ps ax output a bit to see what's going on, but that's it), > I'm wondering how all this works and can't find any explanation on a > practical level. So I thought I might ask a few questions here. > > 1) Each workflow is actually one of those "ps ax" processes?
Hi Lance, "operating system for business processes" is an image. We use "business process" to really differentiate from "process" (operating system process). A workflow engine usually provides an API vaguely similar to that of an operating system. You should really learn about the unix operating system. http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills2 http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Unix-and-Internet-Fundamentals-HOWTO/index.html http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ The third link is maybe a good starting point. Ruote doesn't map 1 business process instance to 1 operating system process. > 2) How many processes does (or could) an application run in production > on average (10, 1000, a million)? Pieces of ruote processes not in use are stored to disk (depends on the persistence mechanism) so it depends on the size of the storage. Then throughput is another story. > 3) If you have an 'operating system for business processes', does this > mean that you have two applications running on the same server > (workflow engine, and say a Rails app)? Could they be one app? Could > there be multiple workflow engines for one Rails app? It depends on how you configured it. The systems I have usually embed the workflow engine inside the web application. Other people prefer to put the workflow engine into a dedicated web application (http://github.com/kennethkalmer/ruote-kit) and let it serve one or more (front) web applications. Yes, it's possible to have more than 1 workflow engine in 1 [web] application. --> http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Unix-and-Internet-Fundamentals-HOWTO/index.html Best regards, -- John Mettraux - http://jmettraux.wordpress.com -- you received this message because you are subscribed to the "ruote users" group. to post : send email to [email protected] to unsubscribe : send email to [email protected] more options : http://groups.google.com/group/openwferu-users?hl=en
