Re: [Openflow-dev] introduction

[kapil t. <kth...@ea...>]

On Monday 25 February 2002 03:13 am, Daniele Tarini wrote:
> On Monday 25 February 2002 03:56, kapil thangavelu wrote:
> > i'm curious what the current state of development of is??
>
> Integration with CMF is still to come. It's the planned way where OF
> (OpenFlow) will go but it still is going through its very first few steps.

ok, i assume this will be through some adapter to the CMF workflow interfaces 
or are there more radical changes under the hood in the works?

> > i'd like to help out and contribute as the alternative seems to be
> > rolling my own. i have little experience with workflow systems outside of
> > the acs-workflow
> > (http://developer.arsdigita.com/doc/acs-workflow/) system which is based
> > on a petri-net model. one nice feature of it was the ttw graphical
> > workflow builder built on top of graphviz. (for example of see this one i
> > built with it
> > http://www.zope.org/Members/k_vertigo/Stories/Gideon/GideonWorkflow). i
> > think this is something that would make openflow much easier to use.
>
> A graphical way to design processes for OpenFlow would be most welcome.
> Point is that we were oriented at having a web-based tool, so the graphical
> process design toolkit would have to be web-based as well (using Java,
> maybe).

the acs-workflow builder (which is what i'm thinking of adapting to openflow) 
is a through the web tool. its very nice and easy to use. its major lack is 
that it depends on graphviz, which while open source falls under a more 
restrictive license (acs is gpl). i'll setup a box running a demo, for people 
to play with. just to be clear i'm thinking the gui should initially just 
focus on process definition.

> > also,
> > i've looked over the code and the documentation for openflow, but my
> > understanding of some of the design details is lacking. is there any
> > reference documentation on the net for some of the openflow design?
>
> Documentation is lacking right now: the main problem is that documentation
> is not up to date with the current OF version. We hope to be able to give
> some documentation soon...

there are many different levels of applicable documentation. something i was 
thinking about was cannabilizing the openacs documentation for acs-workflow 
since its fairly comprehensive and offers a variety of view points (design, 
implementation, end user guide, admin guide). i think the concepts guide,  
the overview, and concepts reference would be great documentation additions 
to open flow with some minor corrections in terms. functionally its apparent 
to me that openflow and acs-workflow are very similiar.

http://developer.arsdigita.com/doc/acs-workflow/

thanks

kapil