Study And Design Of Workflow Engine Base On IOC Container

The research of workflow technology began in 80s of last century. Then it attracted the attention of scholars and research institutions all the way. Today the commercial competition is more and more intense. In this situation, the workflow management system catches more attention as it is a useful tool to improve the company's efficiency.Workflow engine is the core component of workflow management system, the main function of it is to control the running of the workflow. By the development of workflow technology, the use of it is broadly and deeply day by day. Many applications , except workflow management system, need this technology also. But the traditional workflow engine is tied up with workflow management system, so it is hard to reuse the engine in other application.Inversion of Control is called IOC for short. It is a new program mode raised in recent years. This mode makes us easy to config the relationship of each component in the system, so these components can cooperate with each other at run time. So the advantage of IOC is to make the component reusable.After analyzing the disadvantage of the custom workflow engine, we study a new method of design an embedded workflow engine. This engine is base on IOC container which is good at component composition. We first design the architecture of the workflow engine. Then illuminate the function of each component contained in this architecture. We also introduce two concepts here: base component and process component. Then we finish a prototype of the IOC workflow engine by using the Java language and Spring IOC container. At last, we test this prototype to see whether it support those base workflow patterns or not, and then conclude all kinds of workflow patterns that our engine is able to support, illuminate how to extend our engine to meet the special need of some workflows.IOC workflow engine extracts the core functions from the normal workflow engine. It is easy to combine with other applications, and support these applications to control their workflow. We also design 11 base components. By combining these base components, the engine is able to support those normal workflow patterns. So the engine is able to satisfy the applications' need for workflow service.