What OSS project should I look at if I need to do Spring friendly WorkFlow?

Question

We need to add WorkFlow to our Spring managed application. Does anyone have any useful experience in using any of the myriad of OSS Work Flow solutions? Which one is best? Which one integrates with Spring best? Which ones should we avoid?

Answer 1

If you only need some simple process orchestration, Spring's own Web Flow, despite its name can serve as a orchestration task manager. If you need to preserve state for several days then you will need to become an 'early adopter' of one of the open-source projects. You may want to look at Eclipse's BPEL project.

My hunch is that once a clearer picture of the BPEL/BPM/Workflow space emerges you will see Spring provide an abstraction layer the same way they have for JDBC, Transactions, ORM frameworks etc...

Answer 2

We're looking at Drools/Guvnor, possibly integrated with jBPM (as in this presentation), to add a workflow engine to our Spring/JEE app, but we're still in the very early phases of trying it out.

Answer 3

I second Spring Web Flow. Depending on how complex the process is, Web Flow is great for managing various states and I've found that it's pretty easy to pick up and there's a good amount of documentation out there for it.

Answer 4

Like Brian said if you're doing anything of great complexity you might look at using BPEL.

There are a number of open source BPEL engines, one that comes to mind is Apache Orchestration Director Engine

Answer 5

ActiveVOS is by far the best BPEL engine in my opinion. Download the evaluation version and give it a go. JBoss have even adopted their open source offering.