Based On Eclipse's Visual Workflow Editor

As the new technology of enterprise information, workflow technology originated in the field of production process and office automation.When applied to manage business process, workflow technology gets more and more attention.With the developing of workflow technology, workflow products and technology keep growing and transforming. However,there are a lot of obvious defects in workflow technology currently available.It is manifested that different workflow product provided by different developer can not be inter-operated,with lack of supporting to distributing environment with different architecture,the immaturity of workflow modeling technology and shortage of an uniform specification.As the basic of Workflow Management technology, the basic requirement for workflow editing including workflow modeling is that the processes are modeled in a simple and virtual way.The workflow editing tool is one such package including the definition of the graphical tools, and users use workflow editing tools to achieve enterprise business process definition, process reengineering and process management.After the deep research and study of the present workflow technologies based on BPEL4ws,the author designs and implements a workflow editing system based on Eclipse.The main works done by the author are listed below:Firstly, the paper introduces the basic concept of workflow, workflow managementsystem and WebServices.Then it analyses BPEL4WS and flow description language based on servevice. The focus of analysis and research is web service technology and business process execution language based on web service definition.Secondly, the paper analyses the architecture of Eclipse and how to use GEF to implement a graphics library .Then it analyses workflow model and designs the properties of model.After that, a graphics library based on BPEL4ws is design and implemented to support workflow process definition.Thirdly, a Workflow editor based on Eclipse is design and implemented after analysis of functional requirements Workflow editor based on BPEL4ws.The workflow editor support flow description, flow simulation and automatic verification of BPEL expression.Finally, an application case is presented to show how to use the workflow editor.It is shown the system is pratical and convenient.Test results show that the workflow editor based Eclipse can design workflow process to meet the needs of enterprise-class, finish creation and end of flow examples, transform graphical description of flow to BPEL and workflow files and check the workflow definition.