Java Workflows

Question

Does anyone have experience implementing any of the available open source solutions? If so, what solution would be your recommendation?

Answer 1

Alfresco does what you want (and much more) with very little customization. Not simple, but easy to set up.

OpenWFE is a simple workflow, but in this case you will need to learn more concepts before you reach your goal.

Syrup is even easier if you don't need workflow management functionality and plan to write your own interface.

Other noteworthy workflow mechanisms include jBPM , Bonita, and Shark .

Answer 2

Carlos E. Perez summarizes many different open source engines written in Java .

The post is getting a little old (March 2007), but still full of useful information.

Answer 3

Perhaps a tracker? http://jtrac.info <first look here, if not as a solution, then google: open source trackers: and there are so many that I don’t know where to start.

As for approval / disapproval, it will be a matter of creating a task, and then assigning the task to the pool of authorized officers and returning them to the development pool if they were approved.

From experience, everything becomes hairy when the workload for each task allocated to the work pool changes. We used the PeopleSoft system in the Eternal Downward Spiral. This did not pay attention to the required amount of work, and I understand that they paid a lot for this terrible "decision"!

Any workload distribution system that I chose would at least take into account the workload for each task. This is due to the fact that if you are fulfilling a daily work quota based on the total number of tasks performed and cleared, and not on a quantitative load; you can and will have people who attack easy tasks, who are subsequently praised for the fact that they all play.

I cannot vouch for the first option to which I provided the link, but I quickly cross-referenced it as the top sentence; how far Java problem tracking systems are.

You may need a third step to ensure quality, but I need more information to give further advice.

Answer 4

OpenWFE has moved to Ruby, so it leaves the engines quoted by ddimitrov (cheers) as well as osworkflow . IIRC, you will find them all in the Carlos E. Perez report, indicated by jamesh.