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Windows workflow is an excellent framework for implementing business processes. One thing that is missing in it is direct support for human activities. Several approaches to solving this problem exist, but they are not generic enough for general usage. In this article we will define one of the approaches to a completely generic implementation of human activities in WF.
Although OMG is not scheduled to get to BPMN 2.0 until August/September timeframe, the initial announcements about its possible directions have caused a lot of activities on the Web.
JBoss is close to releasing version 1.0 of their "Process Virtual Machine", an ambitious project that seeks to provide a definition language agnostic process execution engine. InfoQ spoke with project lead Tom Baeyens about the project, and how the PVM changes the BPM landscape.
BPMN's adoption is increasing rapidly. In this post, we review some recent activity such as the publication of BPMN 1.1 by the OMG, a tutorial on how to use the Eclipse SOA Tools Platform to "Execute Business Processes" and a comprehensive 120 minute tutorial on BPMN by Bruce Silver.
In another "virtual panel session", we took the opportunity to talk with representatives of the new OASIS BPEL4People Technical Committee and get their feedback on just why we need this work. Apart from asking them what BPEL4People (and WS-HumanTask) are all about, we asked them how this relates to other BPMN efforts and what else we can expect in this area.
OSWorkflow by Diego Adrian Naya Lazo discusses the open-source OSWorkflow, a Java-based workflow engine. The book's publisher, Packt Publishing, also provided InfoQ with an excerpt from Chapter 4 of the book, entitled Using OSWorkflow in your Application. InfoQ spoke with Naya Lazo about the areas that the book covers and about OSWorkflow in general.
Robert Pickering continues the conversation in this third article on F# and this time focuses on Asynchronous Workflows and the resulting peformance gains obtained when used. While this article focuses on F#, the learnings are applicable across .NET languages.
Workflow Foundation is a new workflow engine from Microsoft. Microsoft is embedding Worfklow Foundation in many of its products like Office 2007, Windows Vista and soon Biztalk itself. Matt Winkler, Microsoft Technical Evangelist, walks through the story of Workflow Foundation, when to use it and the futures planned in the next version.
Keith Donald goes in depth on Spring Web Flow, which solves the problem of orchestrating control navigations within a web application in Spring MVC, Struts, and JSF. Keith talks about how to design workflows in web apps and technical details such as how the flows are fault tolerant and how they integrate into web frameworks.
