[Zope3-dev] Community opinion about workflow engine

[Kapil Thangavelu]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 11:48:24 -0400, Godefroid Chapelle  
<gotcha at bubblenet.be> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> We have the opportunity to bid for a project concerning
> the automation of administrative processes.
> The client currently has software in Python and Zope/Plone.
>
> They are quite explicit that they want their new applications to be
> built as much as possible with a mix of generic shareable modules and of
> custom modules.
>
> This is a quite big project that, among others, includes the aspects of
> collaboration with / support of the community.
>
> One of the questions we are exploring is : "which workflow engine should  
> we use/expand on ?"
>
> In order to help us make a proposal, we would be very interested to hear  
> your comments both
>
> - about the existing workflows (DCWorkflow, Zope3.wfmc, AlphaFlow,
> OpenFlow...)

dcworkflow simple to use, well known, needs extension via custom guards  
and triggers to accomodate alot of workflow customization (send email,  
route to manager, etc.)

zope3.wfmc.. abstract, potentially powerful, but imo, needs quite a bit of  
code to make anything non trivial functional.

alphaflow.. i like the best as an architecture (ignoring AT  
implementation), i think that investing time rewriting it on z3 concepts  
would be time well spent, it has flexibility, a library for common  
actions, supports organizational workflows much better, and is model  
complete in terms of constructs to model conceptual workflows.

openflow.. nothing to say.

depending on your timeline.. of the two worth investigating, i would  
recommend alphaflow and z3.wfmc

two cents,

-kapil