[Zope] Generic Workflow Products?

[albert boulanger]

Kapil Thangavelu <kthangavelu@earthlink.net> wrote:

   The PTK has been undergoing radical changes as of late. Its worth taking
   another look at as the current design is much more supportive of
   alternative workflow designs.

Disclamer: This is my gleaming -- I could be off.  I have done a
keyword search on the Zope-PTK list for workflow to understand the
recent discussion on workflow design within PTK. It seems to me that
workflow is tied to strongly with documents in the design plan. In the
model of workflow being discussed there, documents march through
workflow steps. What if a workflow step is a computation and requires
multiple data sources to be done? Instead, a workflow step needs to
have an explicit representation with data items (documents) associated
with it having some kind of version info associated with them. This
need comes from the use cases that I deal with in setting up workflow
for science and engineering computation.

For a good review of workflow requirements see:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/endeavors/docs/AdvancedWorkflow.pdf


It would be nice if the workflow system understood how to act in a
distributed way, like what SWAP, (an XML based protocol -- think
webdav for workflow -- for distributing workflow) is trying to do:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ietfswap/swap-prot.txt

and the later work, Wf-XML by WFMC.

This in turn is based on early WFMC's efforts. See the workflow & internet white
paper and reference model at:

http://www.aiim.org/wfmc/finalwp.pdf

http://www.aiim.org/wfmc/standards/docs/tc003v11.pdf

There are models (some UML) contained within that would be useful to
use as guides for patterns for workflow I believe.


Yours in workflow,
Albert Boulanger
aboulanger@vpatch.com