Based On Xml And Relational Structure Of Lightweight Workflow Engine

To acquire preponderance over global competition, enterprises must rapidly response the market' s requirements, constantly adjust their orgnization mode and reconstruct their business process. Process's design , optimization and management become the important measure in business competition. Enterprises instantly require the support for their business process' s reconstruction.With the evolvement of business applications, enterprises' business becomes more complicated, at the same time, enterprises promote the requirements for business flexibility, All these result in the increase of cost of business development. Developers hope to find a system platform to rapidly develop business applications. Workflow technology facilitates this by providing methodologies and technologies to support business process modeling and optimizing.According to the analysis of the requirements to develop critical business applications in telcom data service, this paper presents a framework of a XML and relationship-based lightweight workflow engine, which is built over the conventional relational database system. It consists of three components: organization model, information model and control model. The reasons that the concepts of XML relationship and lightweight are adopted to design the workflow engine are thoroughly discussed in the paper. Also, this paper sets forth the principle to design, the representation and of the way to implement the organization, information and control model of the workflow engine, respectively. A prototype of this workflow engine has been applied to a project about the data service process in telcom, which shows the application of the workflow engine can markedly shorten the cycle of the development critical business applications.