[Zope3-dev] Community opinion about workflow engine

[Christian Theune]

Hi,

this definitely invites for some biased commenting. ;)

Am Montag, den 12.03.2007, 16:48 +0100 schrieb Godefroid Chapelle:
> 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...)

AlphaFlow is currently on the trip to version 2.0. We've been removing
support for older Plones (2.0, 2.1) and are running on Plone 2.5 now.

Additionally, we'll feature an extension of the architecture to fix the
problem that workflows become crowded of technical activities by
introducing "aspects". Those will allow the control flow itself to stay
focused on the business aspects of the workflow and annotate the start
and end(s) of an activity with aspects (like changing security etc).

The existing activities will stay or be converted into aspects. Check
the doc/proposals directory in AlphaFlow to find out a little bit more
about this.

Additionally we finally will support editing workflows visuall. We gave
up on the creation of our own visual editor and will support importing
external formats into AlphaFlow. Due to a customer project we start by
providing an import for Microsoft Visio XML.

Unfortunately we can not just rewrite the whole thing for Zope 3 and
then make it work with Plone again at once. When implementing the new
features we are going to use as many Zope 3 technologies as possible,
though. Some things, like AT, are going to stay for a while though. :/

We'd be happy to help you if you have any questions regarding the use of
AlphaFlow of course.

We have an extensive list of issues we had when pondering DCWorkflow and
OpenFlow for a project that reasons why we did not choose them.


Google should have a copy of one of my talks somewhere.

Christian

-- 
gocept gmbh & co. kg - forsterstraße 29 - 06112 halle/saale - germany
www.gocept.com - ct at gocept.com - phone +49 345 122 9889 7 -
fax +49 345 122 9889 1 - zope and plone consulting and development
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