MiniFlow, A Lightweight Workflow Management System

As an essential technology to realize business process automation, Workflow technology becomes a research hot spot gradually these years. Most of existing workflow products are huge, complex, hard to use, and they are often unique in their style and can't integrate with business applications seamless. These cause they are not fit for many medium and small native projects.MiniFlow, a lightweight WfMS (Workflow Management System) based on J2EE, is constructed aiming to solve these problems. MiniFlow has practical and comprehensive functions, a clear and open architecture, a simple but mature model, and it is easy to use, lightweight and transplantable. This thesis discusses the improvement of MiniFlow over traditional WfMS from WfMS architecture, WfMS development framework, workflow model. The architecture of MiniFlow fully conforms to the standard of workflow reference model of WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition), using XPDL (XML Process Defining Language) as its own process defining language. MiniFlow is a scalable WfMS that has only one workflow engine. MiniFlow uses Struts + Hibernate, a modern and popular J2EE develop framework to fulfill its design goal effectively. MiniFlow has a simple but practical workflow model that is composed of process model, organization model and information model.This thesis elaborates the design and implementation of MiniFlow engine. Fully adopting the object-oriented design ideas, the workflow engine is composed of model classes and service classes. Model classes are the object model of main entities of the workflow model, the execution of workflow is the response of the interaction of objects of model classes. Service classes give infrastructural service for model classes. Finally the implementation of the workflow engine is put up and how the engine is used in a practical project is also described.