Re: [Springframework-developer] Re: workflow

[Fernando M. <fm...@de...>]

see below,

On Saturday 14 August 2004 14:07, Oliver Geisser wrote:
> 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.

http://www.opensymphony.com/osworkflow/3.%20Understanding%20OSWorkflow.html
This seems to give a good grasp of Osworkflow concepts.
As far as I know, Hani and Patrick are the developers behind it.
Recently some Spring integration code has been comited which makes it easy to use Spring configured Hibernate Session.
We're using it at werk3at.com and the integration was really quick and easy, we're even geting our Functions and Conditions loaded from the appCtx and participating in Transactions.
I agree though that osworkflow is still a bit of a mess, specially AbstractWorkflow.java, and it doesn't care for standards.
We've looked at jbpm2, but as you said:

> 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.

And since we needed something quickly, we went with osworkflow.
If in the future jbpm2 code will change to allow more easy integration with Spring, we might replace Osworkflow, but for now it's working fine for our usecases.