Using SWF as general purpose workflow engine

[Christian]

Hi everyone,
is it possible to use SWF as a general purpose workflow engine?. I have to evaluate wether SWF can be used as a stand-alone module that can be integrated into any environment (e.g. normal Web app, Rich Client). The problem is that I have to use a home-grown framework where I don't have access to a HttpServletRequest/HttpServletResponse object pair.
Thus, I cannot simply call the handleRequestInternal method of the FlowController to use SWF.

I dont' want to write my own Work-Flow engine for my project, cause I know SWF already and really like it.

I think if you could use SWF without the FlowController, it might be possible. But maby I'm seeing things a little bit too simple :-) .

Chris

[dadams]

I was asking about the same thing http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?t=15404. I got a little work done on the implementation I described, but have not had a lot of time to work on it recently. Seems like it would be useful to a lot of people since SOA / Rich client projects are getting more popular. Maybe I can finish it up this weekend.

[klr8]

SWF is completely decoupled from any particular 'protocol' (e.g. HttpServletRequest/HttpServletResponse), so it should be possible to integrate it into pretty much any environment. Obviously you would not be using the FlowController, since that is completely web specific. Take a look at the FlowExecutionManager class which manages actual flow execution (note that FlowController just delegates to a flow execution manager). The FlowExecutionManager is protocol independent, so you should be able to start from there.

One thing to keep in mind though is that SWF was not designed to be a general purpose workflow engine. Page flow is a simple form of workflow. It lacks workflow concepts like a split and join. However, that being said, SWF is extremely flexible so with things like custom state types you would be able to go pretty far.

Erwin

[Christian]

Thanks a lot for your replies!
If I have a some free time, I'll experiment a little

Chris

[dmurat]

Christian, maybe http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?t=14935 post can be of some use for you.