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Re: AW: [jwt-dev] AgilPro metamodel vs XPDL schema comparison
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Florian:
Thank you for your feedback.
I will try to address your questions here.
Note that what I sent is just a snapshot of a work in progress, and you
should NOT consider it a comprehensive comparison yet.
Now that you have gotten a look at what I am producing, I guess I should
ask if you think it will be useful once I complete it?
When is the new AgilPro going to be available? Your new additions look
interesting, and I would like to incorporate them without having to go back
and change too much.
Also, I just noticed how the AgilPro ActivityEdges redraw themselves to go
around other objects. Very nice.
---------------
From what I have explored so far, I can see that AgilPro is missing subflow
and deadline entities.
I have not, however gotten into the data area at all yet, or examined in
detail much more than the XPDL items I have detailed.
---------------
Where I was referring to AgilPro:Actions that are directly under
AgilPro:Project,
I should have said:
AgilPro:Activities that are directly under an AgilPro:Package
I am sorry, I am suffering from terminology overload here, and having the
same term mean different things in the two different domains certainly
doesn't help.
---------------
Yes, an XPDL:WorkflowProcess coresponds to an AgilPro:Activity
---------------
XPDL:DataField will corespond to AgilPro:Data, however, I have not gotten
into that area in detail yet.
I do know that the XPDL data area is more thoroughly defined than yours.
For example, AgilPro:DataType is a String where the XPDL:DataType is a
collection of specifically defined kinds of data.
---------------
XPLD:Applications will corespond to AgilPro:Applications.
---------------
A Description is a string that describes the item, like an AgilPro:Comment
Documentation is a string that contains a file path to an external file
that contains documentation on the item
---------------
OK, I was proposing that Decison/Merge nodes be enhanced to contain the
XPDL splitting/joining semantics.
What I think your comment says is:
The ForkNode and the DecisonNode are the same except ForkNode implies the
AND spliting type and DecisionNode implies the XOR spliting type
The JoinNode and the MergeNode are the seme except JoinNode implies the AND
joining type and MergeNode implies the XOR joining type
Is this correct?
---------------
Bonita:Hook and Bonita:Properties are vendor specific extensions that are
needed to use the XPDL with the Bonita engine.
To quote from the Bonita API:
Hooks are user-defined logic that can be triggered at defined points in the
life of an activity. Those defined points are:
Before Start hook is called just before the activity starts. The Before
Start hook is not considered to be in the same transaction as the
activity. The Before Start hook is not triggered for automatic
activities.
After Start hook is called just after an activity starts. It is
considered to be in the same transaction as the activity. The After
Start hook is not triggered for automatic activities that cannot be
anticipated.
Cancel hook is called before canceling an activity and it’s considered
to be in the same transaction as the activity.
Before Terminate hook is called just before an activity terminates. The
Before Terminate hook is considered to be in the same transaction as
the activity.
After Terminate hook is called just after the activity has terminated.
It is not considered to be in the same transaction as the activity.
Anticipating hook is called when an automatic activity is started if the
activity is anticipable. It is considered to be in the same
transaction as the activity.
OnReady hook is called when an activity becomes ready, so it would be
very useful to notify the user responsible for executing it. It is
not considered to be in the same transaction as the activity.
OnDeadline hook is called when the activity deadline expires. It is not
considered to be in the same transaction as the activity.
I believe that, among other things, these are involved in adequately
interfacing the workflow activities with legacy transaction processing
applications.
In Bonita, in you can associate data with an XPDL:Activity, and define
conditions for its propagation to subsequent Activities. This is
somewhat different than the input and
output data that is modeled in AgilPro.
I have not delved into either of these elements yet to determine if they
can be modeled by existing AgilPro elements.
---------------
Here is the definition of the Participant types from the XPDL spec:
RESOURCE_SET - A set of resources.
RESOURCE - A specific resource agent.
ROLE - This type allows performer addressing by a role or skill set. A role
in this context is a function a human has within an organization. As a
function isn’t necessarily unique, a coordinator may be defined (for
administrative purposes or in case of exception handling) and a list of
humans the role is related to.
ORGANIZATIONAL_UNIT - A department or any other unit within an
organizational model.
HUMAN - A human interacting with the system via an application presenting a
user interface to the participant.
SYSTEM - An automatic agent.
Basically, at least in Bonita, System performer means that once an activity
is triggered, it is performed and terminates automatically, entirely under
the control of computer resources accessible to the server, without any
user interaction. In addition, Bonita has the concept of dynamic
participant assignment. A hook is called at runtime, which decides on the
proper participant by examining the data that is available to the
XPDL:Activity.
Steve
"Florian
Lautenbacher"
<florian.lautenba To
cher@informatik.u "'Java Workflow Toolbox'"
ni-augsburg.de> <jwt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: cc
jwt-dev-bounces@e
clipse.org Subject
AW: [jwt-dev] AgilPro metamodel vs
XPDL schema comparison
04/12/2007 01:00
AM
Please respond to
Java Workflow
Toolbox
<jwt-dev@eclipse.
org>
Hi Steve,
thanks for your detailed comparison of AgilPro and XPDL. Please find my
comments to your document inline.
What is your impression of AgilPro? Surely there are many properties that
we
need to include - but this can be done easily. In my opinion the most
important aspects of XPDL 1 are already available. Would you agree?
Perhaps somebody else can say some words about XPDL 2.0 and how much
changes
to the meta-model would be necessary to support XPDL 2, too?
Best regards,
Florian
