[Zope-PTK] Example activity-explicit workflow system

Kent Polk kent@goathill.org
9 Jan 2001 23:00:13 GMT


On 29 Dec 2000 10:40:00 -0600, albert boulanger wrote:
>
>   I am very interested in a general, fairly full featured  workflow system
>   on top of Zope as opposed to using an external workflow product for a
>   fundamental reason. While one could come up with a way of getting what I
>   need with an external system, it would be messy. I need workflows to be
>   explicit and versioned. We make use of ZODB to version content that end
>   users generate. We don't make use of Zope's versioning but use or own
>   hierarchical version tree which is easy to do in Zope. End users
>   generate new workflows and revisit  past workflows. The user sees this
>   versioning as notebook pages using a scientific notebook metaphor.
>
>   It is much cleaner to use ZODB and ZPublisher to do all this instead of
>   having a version tree in Zope and a bunch of correspondences to outside
>   objects in an external workflow system. Thus,  there is a lot of value
>   in having a fairly general workflow system whose representation and
>   publishing uses ZODB and ZPublisher.
>
>By the way, if there are other folks interested in such a workflow
>system let me know. We may just bite the bullet and build one. I have

I *think* this is the type of thing we were discussing last month
before the holidays (along with subworkflows, etc). The workflow
we need is very similar to the simple Publishing House workflow
that I posted last month except much of our workflow would need to
interact with software agents instead of human agents, however I
don't see that as a problem.

I'm trying to get up to speed on the current PTK and how it works,
wondering if there is some plan yet towards implementing what we
discussed before the holidays. Is it time to re-open those discussions
so we can look at implementing those ideas as a community effort?

(Who's at the wheel and where are we going? :^)