Re: [Perl-workflow-devel] Teaming up... Alexander Klink

[Alexander K. <ak-...@cy...>]

Hi Jonas,
Hi all,

> I am glad to announce that Alexander Klink has joined the team as
> developer.
Thanks, I'm happy to join.

> Alexander is working with Workflow professionally and his
> contributions has been (and will be) a benefit to the project in
> general.
To be a bit more specific here, I am one of the core developers of
the OpenXPKI project (see www.openxpki.org), which is developing
a professional trust center/certificate authority software. Workflows
are one of the core concepts of OpenXPKI and thus Workflow is one of
the most important modules we use.
Here is a bit of a wishlist from us, if no-one speaks up, we will
probably implement those features in the future:

- fetching a workflow ID only: today you still have to pass the ID
  and the type of the workflow to fetch_workflow(), which is a bit
  annoying and pretty useless
- Workflow versioning: As we might want to change workflow definitions
  while our software is running, we want to introduce versions for
  the definitions. This means that existing workflows could
  continue running with the old configuration, while new workflows
  of the same type can already use the new configuration.
  This is something that Martin Bartosch is considering to implement.
- Workflow activity state: It would be pretty useful for us to know
  whether a workflow is currently doing something (e.g. executing
  an activity or checking a condition). This is something that
  could possibly be implemented using a flag that is set just before
  checking a condition or running an activity and unsetting it
  afterwards. This would for example enable us to "restart"
  autorunning workflows that have stopped in a state that has the
  new "may_stop" flag.

I have also added those to the SF feature request tracker.

Furthermore, I still have a little script lying around that visualizes
Workflow definitions using GraphViz. This is particularly useful if you
have large Workflows that you have designed on paper and you want to
check whether your XML definition matches your plan. For a preview of how
this looks like see:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/attachments/1113-OpenXPKI_23C=
3_Paper.pdf
(page 2)

Once I clean it up a little, I could check it in as well (where would be =
a
good place for it?).

> There is plenty of room for more developers and contributors.
I guess at least Martin will be on board soon :-)

Greetings,
    Alex