[Zope3-dev] Community opinion about workflow engine

[Christian Theune]

Am Montag, den 12.03.2007, 12:16 -0400 schrieb 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),

Thanks! I don't like the AT implementation myself either, although I'm
also kind of happy that I made AT do what I want. ;)

>  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.

Ack. However, some user-friendlyness is still missing. See my other
post. 

> openflow.. nothing to say.

I think it's dead by now. It didn't seem active a few years ago when we
looked at it. Also, the code was kind of scary. It has a very generic
model that allows a lot of things in general but is missing the
specificity of Alphaflow's library.

Christian

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