The next project, data modelling, warehouse, inventory?

So, as we are about to roll out a massive project to one of our clients, a 'very' large British company, I am excited in as much as there will be new things on the horizon. Several months ago now I blogged on an upcoming project involving workflow engines, and the fact that this was something about which I new absolutely nothing. Well I find myself in the same situation now.

It looks like for another client in the UK, a well known University, we have a need to develop some kind of inventory / stores / data warehouse system. Once again, I know nothing about this, and my first thought is, 'is there an excellent open source framework out there for this?'.

I am currently researching online, and looking through various books. But this sort of thing is of course better coming from those who are experienced, anyone out there know anything about this?

My last project hooked me up with the guys at JBoss, their workflow engine is really very good, and will only get better over time. What is out their for warehousing, inventory?

Any pointers appreciated :-)

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 :-)

Workflow software/projects

The most poorly documented, tried and tested software I have yet encountered.. that sums it up.

Most of the projects I tried either did not work as advertised due to bugs, or were so poorly documented that it would have taken me weeks to get started.

Luckily in the case of some, there were some helpful people in the Open Source world to give me a hand getting started. Notably with OSWorkflow.

Come on guys, a couple of howto's, some some testing and a friendly to beginners site is not too much to ask?

To be fair it turns out there are some books and products coming soon for OSWorkflow, they will be helpful, just a little too late for my project unfortunately.