Hi, to respond to your questions about SOA and workflow (based on my own experience).
1. SOA. OFBiz would indeed be compatible with an SOA as it provides you with an easy way to expose pretty much any functionality as services, which can be exported as SOAP services very easily. OFBiz also helps you manage the transactionality, interfaces, and interdependencies of your services. Most of the existing business functionality in the OFBiz built-in modules (accounting, ecommerce) etc, is exposed as services. 2. Workflow. OFBiz workflow support is/was based on the Shark workflow engine (shark.enhydra.org), but I do not believe it ever reached a fully functional state. And now, in the default OFBiz configuration, it is disabled. Therefore I consider it effectively defunct (please jump in and correct me here, people, if am wrong!). About 18 months ago I seriously considered using Shark (outside of OFBiz) for a workflow-intensive product. It had a nice graphical editor for XPDL, but poor documentation and poorly documented code. This made it difficult to integrate into the rest of the application (especially user-task mapping). After several days of fighting with its API I gave up (it is one of the very few libraries I have given up on in my life!). I went for a simpler alternative, OS Workflow (http://www.opensymphony.com/osworkflow/) and have been very happy for that, it does what it says on the tin and is enormously flexible. Atlassian JIRA uses this for its workflow control too. However please note that OS Workflow is NOT a product directly comparable to Intalio or Shark. It does NOT provide an easy way for "business process" experts to remodel core business logic on the fly via cute graphical interface (personally, I believe that this does not happen nearly as much as BPMS vendors would have you believe). It DOES allow your developers with a set of tables, Java APIs and and an XML configuration language so that they can treat workflows as a first class entity - that is, create a "process-oriented" system. Now, returning to OFBiz, its data model does provide all the basic entities for modelling a workflow, and pretty much ALL of its business entities, provide for the control of status and history information. So, if you wanted to have a functional workflow module integrated with OFBiz, you would not be starting from scratch but perhaps from 50%. Now that Intalio has gone Open Source, it /might/ a viable alternative to Shark. However I notice from its Community License that... a. It has some restrictions on production use although I could not see what these are b. You can only use it with Derby or MySQL (so for instance Oracle or PostgresSQL would be out). c. You can only download the code in object form, which is a rather bizarre Open Source license (free as in beer and not as in speech!!). Anyway, I would be interested to hear how you get on, cameron cameron ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Answers - Got a question? Someone out there knows the answer. Try it now. http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/
