[Springframework-developer] Re: workflow

[Oliver G. <oli...@gm...>]

Hi

mustaoglu serdar wrote:
> hi,
> I want to learn experiences about worflow on spring
>  
> which open source project is suitable: jbpm , cor:cern , twister ..
> anyone can compare according to integration, performance and usability.
> thanks.

As far as I know there is no Spring integration of a workflow engine.
But we face the same problem and so we have evaluated some workflow engines.

There are many workflow engines out there: 
http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/workflow_in_java/view

But we want an embeddable, non-EJB engine. For this requirement we found 
only the following ones:

- Osworkflow
This project looks good on the first sight. But if you take a second 
look there are (IMHO) some problems. Osworklow suffers from feature 
creep (integration of many third party libs for scripting, jobs, etc). 
Also the concepts confused me because they do not follow "standards" 
(which is not bad on itself) but there is no good explanation about the 
fundamental ideas behind them. It also seems there is only one active 
developer and no active community.

- Twister
Just at the beginning and not ready for production.

- Bigbross Bossa
Too small and to low-level for us.

- JBPM
JBPM requires EJB. So during our first search we left it out. But JBPM2
changed this. JBPM2 is currently beta. It uses Hibernate for persistence 
(as we do) and it only has a loose coupling to a user database.

- con:cern
Did not know this one until your post. I just read the webpage for 5 
minutes. Looks interesting and I will look further into this.


So currently we are investigating how to "springify" JBPM2. We have a 
working version but it is a "quick&dirty" solution. We plan to polish 
the integration and offer it to JBPM2.

In short:

If you only want to start/create a JBPM2 engine from within Spring this 
is easy. Spring 1.1 supports static factory methods and JBPM2 has a 
static factory method to use.
But if you want JBPM2 to use a Spring configured Hibernate Session 
Factory which takes part in Spring controlled transactions then it will 
become a little bit tricky.

Hope this helps.

Ciao, Olli

--og