Overview

A business process or workflow is a coordinated chain of activities intended to produce a business result. Total automation of business processes is practically unachievable without considering human interaction. In some processes, human workflow is a major emphasis. In others, human participation is only required on an exception basis.

Workflow SE is a JBI based engine, which provides task management and human intervention in a business process.Workflow SE uses a simple task definition language to define the tasks related functionality like task assignment to user/groups, escalation, timeout etc.

Why a separate Workflow SE?

Following are some of the reasons:

• BPEL does not provide human interaction.
• Extending BPEL with new custom extension is cumbersome and makes BPEL complex, non portable.
• Clear separation of human interaction/task related functionality into a separate component.
• A simple language to define tasks functionality.

Also see overview of different concepts .

Current features

• Task creation and assignment to users/groups.
• Task escalation.
• Task timeout.
• Client API.
• Task specific API.
• Uses user security subject propagation through JavaEE SE for showing user specific task list.
• Support for recovery and reliability. (almost)

BPEL and Workflow Interaction

Following diagram illustrates a typical interaction between various open jbi components. This also shows how a BPEL business process can invoke a web service operation implemented by Workflow SE for task management.

This page (revision-6) was last changed on 01-Mar-07 12:00 PM, -0800 by RiteshAdval.
This page was created on 20-Feb-07 14:15 PM, -0800 by WorkflowSE.

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