wftk: wftk core engine

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The wftk core library, defined here, is the core workflow functionality of the whole wftk system. Everything else just supports this stuff, basically. It's implemented as a library so we can build it into other systems.

The library consists of: So, OK, that list is really short. The reason is simple: wftk is built almost entirely on adaptors. The core engine, besides defining the interpreter used to figure out what comes next, is really just a wrapper API around about ten adaptor classes, which define sets of functionality which can be defined in the context of whatever else is going on in the system.

Adaptors
The core engine uses the following adaptors (the links go to specific information): The point of these adaptors is to create as flexible and modular a system as possible. The AOLserver database driver system has been a great influence on me here -- with AOLserver it's almost trivial to write a database driver to allow seamless (well, ideally) access to database functionality from scripts, and your scripts don't really change much if you have to switch databases or port to a different system. (Well, except that "standard" query language isn't, of course, so there's still work to do when porting, but you get the idea.)

I'll explain briefly what each of those adaptor types does -- for more information, please follow the individual links, where the precise functionality of each type is enumerated, and links are given to actual implementations.

The datasheet repository, for example, is where datasheets are stored. The procdef repository is where process definitions are stored. In the prototype, each of these was implemented as a fairly simple system of files and directories. In the case of the procdef repository, however, there are already good solutions to things like version control -- CVS is a good example. Ideally, if CVS is available, the procdef repository should be able to use it for "real" version control and also for all the integration possibilities which are already there. Thus the procdef repository is implemented as an adaptor.

Another motivating example, this one for the datasheet repository: in the vast majority of systems, we'll want a general "processes" table. Instead of keeping process information in two places (i.e. that table plus a directory of XML files) it seems a lot more natural -- and will end up being much more stable and supportable -- to store the process datasheet as a BLOB right in the process table. This is easily solved by exposing the datasheet repository functionality as another adaptor and telling wftk to use that adaptor. The upshot of the adaptor concept is: if you have a better solution already in the system, then use it. WFTK just wants to coordinate it all so you can call it workflow.

The user and perms adaptors allow the core engine (and its CGI implementations) to ask a directory who the current user is and what permissions the current user has. Naturally, the user module included with the wftk is the preferred one, if that's the right word, but once I've learned something about LDAP I'm sure I'll want to integrate with it. More to the point, if your organization already has something in place that can do user authentication and permission definitions, then wftk should work with it. The permissions model for wftk has turned out to be a really interesting affair, since it allows a three-way decision: actions may be permitted, denied, or deferred until an approval process has been completed. This is a sweet, elegant way to do things and I can't wait to actually apply it somewhere.

The task index provides an interface to an index (basically a relational database). The overview talks about the difference between core workflow and task management. Suffice it to say here that the db adaptor allows us to specify a set of databases to which current status of tasks and processes can be written so that other systems can also use that information. It's a little counterintuitive to think of process information in a task repository, but the idea is that the task-centric viewpoint is what gives the adaptor type its name.

The notification adaptor provides a way to adapt wftk to existing messaging protocols. I'm implementing email and a database-based task manager notification methods, but you can easily imagine others, like Outlook integration or alpanumeric pagers.

The action adaptor is going to be one of the most exciting parts of wftk. Particularly once I drop this engine into Python, it's going to be nice to be able to run Python snippets from inside a process. The same thing applies to Perl, Java, Tcl, or what have you. (OK, Java might be a little trickier since it's compiled. I'll see how that all works out.) The action adaptor also provides a place to check permissions and interpose approval processes -- I'm not entirely sure yet how to balance these two applications, and maybe I'm wrong to conflate them. I'm uneasy about allowing scripting in ad-hoc workflow without permissions, though, so I think that scripting mechanisms will probably be forced to undergo permission checking -- with the idea that specific, permissible scripts may be installed to run with no approval (because they're pre-approved.)

Likewise, the data manipulation facilities will be extensible via a datatype adaptor. The details of this (like the scripting adaptor) are pretty fuzzy at this point.

The datastore adaptor deserves a special mention, too. The default storage for values is of course directly in the datasheet. However, especially if we imagine a datasheet adaptor which stores datasheets into a process table, we can easily imagine that we'd much rather have the value itself (or some of them) live directly in the table. Effectively the datavalue in the data sheet would be a pointer to this "real" store, and wftk should be smart enough to update the table when the value is updated in the datasheet. Thus the datastore adaptor, which provides a means to tell wftk where things really are. The datastore adaptor is turning out to be a rather convenient integration tool.

Data sources used
Besides its commands, the engine has two sources of input: the process definition and the datasheet. The procdef stores information about a class of processes; the datasheet stores information about the current instance of that class. Both documents are XML documents, and the core engine interprets these documents using James Clark's expat parser, a stable and fairly simple parser.

Commands can be performed either by calling individual action functions, or passing a very simple list of commands in an XML format to a general command doer thingy function.

Where the code is
At any rate, the organization of this beast is starting to take shape. Instead of developing everything in one monolithic literate presentation, I found myself breaking everything down into smaller pieces: So that's it at the moment. Sky's the limit.

This code and documentation are released under the terms of the GNU license. They are additionally copyright (c) 2000, Vivtek. All rights reserved except those explicitly granted under the terms of the GNU license. This presentation was prepared with LPML. Try literate programming. You'll like it.