Book Image

OSWorkflow: A guide for Java developers and architects to integrating open-source Business Process Management

Book Image

OSWorkflow: A guide for Java developers and architects to integrating open-source Business Process Management

Overview of this book

OSWorkflow is an open-source workflow engine written entirely in Java with a flexible approach and a technical user-base target. It is released under the Apache License. You can create simple or complex workflows, depending on your needs. You can focus your work on the business logic and rules. No more Petri Net or finite state machine coding! You can integrate OSWorkflow into your application with a minimum of fuss. OSWorkflow provides all of the workflow constructs that you might encounter in real-life processes, such as steps, conditions, loops, splits, joins, roles, etc.This book explains in detail all the various aspects of OSWorkflow, without assuming any prior knowledge of Business Process Management. Real-life examples are used to clarify concepts.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
OSWorkflow
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Introduction

Downloading and Installing OSWorkflow


The current OSWorkflow version, 2.8, requires a Java VM version 1.3 or higher. You can download binaries and sources from the OSWorkflow page at http://www.opensymphony.com/osworkflow/. To use the software, you must unpack the files using any compression utility like 7-Zip.

In the binary version you already have everything you need to run, on the other hand, the source code distribution must be compiled using the Jakarta Ant utility.

Getting a Taste from the Distribution

The OSWorkflow distribution comes with a sample web application useful for testing workflow definitions. This test application is packed as a WAR file, called osworkflow-2.8.0-example.war. In order to deploy it, you will need to install a web container such as Jakarta Tomcat.

You can download Tomcat from http://tomcat.apache.org. After downloading, unpack the distribution to a directory, and copy the osworkflow-2.8.0-example.war file into the webapps directory inside the root directory...