What technologies are appropriate for a human workflow system?

Question

I'm researching various workflow architectures and it is overwhelming. The workflow system I am creating will be almost completely human-driven. Very little, if any, asynchronous activity will be taking place.

One possibility is to simply use a RDBMS and have a task table, from which stored procedures would be used to enforce synchronous access to each task. This seems very simple, but I'm having a hard time coming up with reasons why I might need to involve a heavier solution.

If my system has ~500 concurrent users, and there is very little in the way of automated or asynchronous tasks, should I even consider the various workflow patterns/packages out there like Mule, BPEL/SOA, Spring Work Flow, etc?

Answer 1

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is always a good motto. If your workflow is simple and you do not need to separate the control and logic then coding by hand is fine.