Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Another month on, and I am still in Workflow Engine land

So, time goes by, and I am still working with workflow engines, my experience and opinions have changed somewhat.

First up I have dropped OSWorkflow, the graphical designer just did not do what I needed it to. I am now using JBPM from the JBoss folks. And not withstanding the site, which as per all other workflow sites does not point the way to a workflow engine newbie, I am very impressed with the documentation, the helpfulness of the people in the forum, and the capabilities of the product itself, including the graphical designer which is an Eclipse plugin.

The product is fairly stable, and any bugs I do find and report are not critical, so far so good. Most importantly, for a large project with one of my company's largest clients I am able to create business processes emcompassing all of their requirements.

Requirements I see to make this 'the' leading workflow engine would be some improvements to point the way for 'newbies', and a cookbook for common process definition howto's.

I am pleased that all aspects of the project are under ongoing development with regular released.

Now I am looking forward to the post project launch days where I might finally be able to go get some much needed holiday :-)