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Flexible Workflow Management Systems?

Posted by Cliff on from the INfinite-state-machines dept.

Paul Roberts asks: "I just started on my new job and I have to develop, in J2EE, a workflow management system (WMS) for the financial department. I'm both new to J2EE and WMS, so I could really use any help that experienced Slashdot readers have to offer. I have been warned of frequent changes in the process flows, due to changes in the law or management vision, and the system should be able to handle these, including any retroactive changes that may need to be made. As a bonus, the system could produce personalized letters, but if that feature isn't available, we can program that ourselves. I've been searching the web to find existing solutions, Sourceforge gave a list of 2 pages of active projects (and many more inactive projects), OpenSymphony has OSWorkflow, JBoss now includes jBPM. Of all those WM systems around, what are your experiences, what are the things I should look out for - both in features that should be present and in pitfalls to be avoided?"

4 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. *raises hand to ask question* by Anonymous+Crowhead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How, exactly, did you land a job to develop something you know nothing about in a language you know nothing about?

    1. Re:*raises hand to ask question* by _pruegel_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Single-JVM and J2EE can go well together. But yes, there are lots of things to avoid with J2EE. If management requires a task to be solved using J2EE this only proves management to be buzzword-addicted and clueless. However there are also lots of nice and/or even elementary things part of J2EE like JDBC, JNDI, JAXP, Servlet and JSP APIs, JMS and so on.

      Maybe Sun made a huge mistake by putting all these under the J2EE name since this leads to lots of misunderstandings. Even you do a little J2EE bashing while than presenting Spring and JBoss as cool things with those two clearly making heavy use of J2EE technologies.

  2. Re:Object Relational Mapping Frameworks by michaelggreer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    His question was about workflow frameworks, while these are OR frameworks. You left out the most prominant one: Hibernate. I have always thought the Naked Objects folks to be impractically OO purist in their approach, personally. I don't happen to think objects should have to know how to represent themselves. Keep them stupid.

  3. Re:Object Relational Mapping Frameworks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Woah. Now what dows OR-Mapping have to do with the question? Nothing, right? Any good workflow language or workflow API will be independent from storage. Besides I found working with Cayenne much more painful than working with Hibernate and Naked Objects promises lots of things nobody really wants. But this is not the scope of this "Ask Slashdot".