Re: integation with BPM/WF engines

sophie.ramel-bqDqoxiz9wg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Hi,
>
> > This sounds realy great... Are these ebXML transactions  specified in
> > BPSS? I guess not it they are afterwards modeled in XPDL
> No, they're specified in UML activity diagrams, and then transformed 
> into XPDL. We wanted to use UML because more people understand it, and 
> for the execution we wanted to use something near the implementation, 
> so XPDL seemed best.
OK, sounds resonable, although BPSS is imo also specified in a (subset 
of) activity diagrams.
> > hmmm..... WFMOpen... I saw that a while ago. Don't know why I missed it
> > now  gave it a look again and since it is more standards based I'll
> > definately go for this.
> Yes, once I understood how it worked (I needed a little time here...), 
> it worked perfectly.
> by the way, they also have a small XForms implementation, the "webform 
> tool". here's an interesting mail about it: 
> https://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=2394019
> I had made a small comparative study of open source workflow engines a 
> few months ago. The workflow engines that seemed the most interesting 
> for our constraints were bonita (http://bonita.objectweb.org/), shark 
> (http://shark.enhydra.org) and WFMOpen.
One thing I have against shark is that it has this proprietaty 
persistence layer.. Maybe it's not that much of an issue, but it doesn't 
feel right if you want to run it on another appserver besides enhydra.
Come to think of it, that is also what I have against WFMOpen, the 
provide a package/installer for JBoss (which I run at home) but if we 
want to use it on Bea WLS, we have to buy a commercial license... We 
don't mind supporting OS projects, even financially, but we did not have 
a choice of appserver so their reasoning of 'you bought Bea, so you 
should buy WFMOpen' is not valid for us.
> > I'd like to have them tighter integrated and communicate via a
> > messagebus (jms). It's indeed a good idea to not focus on integrating
> > xforms as the internal webinterface of the wf tool but instead using an
> > api to connect to is probably the better way to go.
> Yes, but it also brings new constraints...in our case we already 
> needed decentralized installations of tomcat, so it wasn't a too big 
> constraint.
Yes, but a decentralized installation of tomcat/jboss with a simple 
workflow/bpm engine, xforms and an ebxml server (al integrated) is what 
I want to achieve. Integrating the latter two already works fine, now 
the integration of the WF engine and the ebxml server is step two and 
then integrating the WF engine and chiba
> > Jawe (from enhydra) as a modelling tool is probably also a good
> > startingpoint. Or are you looking for higher level tools?
> Yes, it's a very useful tool. But yes, we'll be looking gor higher 
> level tools for this other project, abandonning XPDL. I don't know 
> much more yet...
you made me curious....

> > All kinds of constraints that are possible in a scheme. Length, regexp,
> > etc.... We have e.g. a schema where we've defined a 'licenceplate'
> > element which has a regexp for the exact allowed format e.g.
> > "[A-Z0-9]-[A-Z0-9]-[A-Z0-9]" I'd like these to be automagically used in
> > the generated html page. This requires schema2xforms to detect those 
> and
> > pass them over into the xform (if that is possible) and then by 
> adapting
> > the xslt, and using some javascript library (already available here and
> > resuable) have these checked on the client-side. I do not a a complete
> > list yet. Maybe we should set up a wiki to have a more structured
> > approach to this.
>
> For the validation, shouldn't that be easy using Xerces? since most of 
> it is already supported.
If you only have a server-side validation yes, but I'd like to have 
these validations done on the client-side as well, so it saves 
roundtrips to the server
> > And these regular expression things (Chiba can currently not validate
> > against a schema if i'm right). right... You do that separately after
> > 'submission' by chiba?
> Yes, I do it from the workflow engine, after the submission by chiba: 
> I simply do an XMLSchema validation with Xerces, so it includes all 
> that works in xerces...
> Sophie
See previous comment

Ronald


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