Workflow Research And Realization Of Workfolw Engine

As the development of workflow automation, workflow system plays more and more important role. As the core of workflow management, workflow engine distinctly perfects the business flow by automatically transferring data according to the pre-defined logical routine and permission conditions under various environments. For better managing business flow, the followed functions should be included in the workflow engine: definite workflow, parse workflow logic routine, run workflow, manage workflow and transfer some important information inside the workflow engine.On the basis of analysing the workflow technology and workflow engine, I describe how to design and realize an agile workflow engine. Developer can make use of this engine to develop a business system with workflow property. Please look into the followed paragraph to the realization of the agile workflow engine.In the second paragraph, I discuss the workflow management system. As core of the workflow reference model, the workflow engine is the model and software that supports the workflow management in workflow definition, parsing and running. In this part, I discuss the workflow management system in details from the functions required, system structure and reference model.The third paragraph describes the related technology and theory developing agile workflow engine, such as J2EE, XML, DTD, Schema, DOM, SAX, XPDL and FSM. J2EE is short for Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition. J2EE is a platform-independent, Java-centric environment/standard for developing, building and deploying component-based multi-tiered/Web-based enterprise applications. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is actually a meta-language for describing other languages—which lets one design his own markup languages for limitless different types of documents. Document Type Definition (DTD) and XML Schema include the constructs for declaring, extending, and restricting the structure of XML. DOM and SAX are widely used APIs for parsing XML. XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) presents a business process in a form that supports automated manipulation, such as modeling, or enactment by a workflow management system base on XML. Finite state machine (FSM) consists of a set of states (current states) and directions on how to change states to next states. That is, finite state machine accepts current state and inputs variables as input, and then finite state machine outputs next state and results. The agile workflow engine discussed in this article is based on FSM theory.I analyze the workflow definition model first in the fourth paragraph, then offer the definition representation of the agile workflow, and explain the definition templates in details.In the fifth paragraph, I give the design model of the agile workflow after summarizing the required functions in workflow engine.The detailed realization of the agile workflow engine is offered in the sixth paragraph including database design, static configuration data design, control center design, configuration module design, parser design, data persistence design and query design.At last, I show an integrated case to apply the agile workflow engine.