OpenWFEru, Standard Library Documentation

Prerequisites

Ruby 1.8.5 or later, RubyGems 0.9.4 or later

Installation

Installation can be handled by Ruby gems. This will pull in any libraries you will need to install

  gem install -y openwferu

Overview

OpenWFEru is a Ruby port of the OpenWFE workflow engine (www.openwfe.org). It is a complete rewrite in Ruby so does not need to use the Java-based engine from OpenWFE.

OpenWFEru was initially implemented in San Joaquin de Flores, Costa Rica. And then in Yokohama, Japan.

One project goal for OpenWFEru is compatibility with its Java based cousin so workflows defined for the Java engine should work with the Ruby implementation. There are some incompatibilities between each implementation.

TODO: Document implementation differences

Example

These are mostly stolen from the unit tests

Creating an workflow engine instance

    require 'rubygems'
    require 'openwfe/def'
    require 'openwfe/workitem'
    require 'openwfe/engine/engine'

    #
    # instantiating an engine

    engine = OpenWFE::Engine.new

    #
    # adding some participants

    engine.register_participant :alice do |workitem|
        puts "alice got a workitem..."
        workitem.alice_comment = "this thing looks interesting"
    end

    engine.register_participant :bob do |workitem|
        puts "bob got a workitem..."
        workitem.bob_comment = "not for me, I prefer VB"
        workitem.bob_comment2 = "Bob rules"
    end

    engine.register_participant :summarize do |workitem|
        puts
        puts "summary of process #{workitem.fei.workflow_instance_id}"
        workitem.attributes.each do |k, v|
            next unless k.match ".*_comment$"
            puts " - #{k} : '#{v}'"
        end
    end

    #
    # a process definition

    class TheProcessDefinition0 < OpenWFE::ProcessDefinition
        sequence do
            concurrence do
                participant :alice
                participant :bob
            end
            participant :summarize
        end
    end

    #
    # launching the process

    li = OpenWFE::LaunchItem.new(TheProcessDefinition0)

    li.initial_comment = "please give your impressions about http://ruby-lang.org"

    fei = engine.launch li
        #
        # 'fei' means FlowExpressionId, the fei returned here is the
        # identifier for the root expression of the newly launched process

    puts "started process '#{fei.workflow_instance_id}'"

    engine.wait_for fei
        #
        # blocks until the process terminates

How to help

If you want to help hacking on openwferu you‘ll probably want the following libraries:

rake

Handle builds, generating documentation, and running unit tests

rubygems

Handles creation of the gems

rote

A framework being used to help with managing the offline written docs

redcloth

OpenWFEru uses textile-markup for its docs. Redcloth provides an engine for it.

tidy

General cleanup

It‘s best if you use gems to install these as the process can get rather tedious by hand.

Prerequisites

Ruby Libraries Install

1. gem install -r rake
2. gem install -r rote redcloth
3. gem install -r tidy

Documentation

The main project site lives at rubyforge at: rubyforge.org/projects/openwferu or openwferu.rubyforge.org

The users mailing list is at : groups.google.com/group/openwferu-users