Welcome!

In a few weeks, this project will receive preliminary design documents as well as a code baseline for a workflow automation engine. The engine is geared towards automating various tasks on behalf of interfacing application where each task is part of a workflow package. The tasks represent invocations of XML-RPC services and may represent any functionality expressable by an XML-RPC server.

This project is the result of recognizing a problem with customer requirement handling. Today the majority of the requirements expressed by customers are hard coded into applications with only the possibility of changing a few settings or so. For instance, when an error occurs within a server application the server probably creates an entry in a log and perhaps sends an email to the administrator. This behaviour was probably decedied upon during the requirement specification phase. If, however, the administrator wishes to receive an SMS notification when an error occurs, the customer is out of luck.

This is the kinds of situations this engine is designed for. An application may express various behaviours in work packages that are executed by the Marquee Workflow Automation Engine. When the error mentioned above occurs, the application asks the engine to execute a particular package, which involves tasks sending email and generating log entries. If, at a later time, the administrator (or whoever) wants to receive an SMS notification when that situation arises, he or she opens up the package through the package modeler and adds a new task to the workflow. The task may be any of the XML-RPC services available on the Internet or the corporate intranet. Neither the engine or the application need to be restarted, and next time the error occurs, the administrator will receive an SMS notification (assuming such an XML-RPC service is available).

If this sounds like something that you would like to share input on, please feel free to add a post to the discussion group (available shortly).

There should be a prototype available in a few weeks or so that we may build upon. The engine will use the Marquee XML-RPC Library (http://xmlrpc.sourceforge.com) to expose it's functionality and call upon functionality in other XML-RPC services.

Have a nice day,

Greger