ant as a workflow engine

[Scott Walters <sc...@integra-online.com>]

I'm in the process of architecting a rewrite of our external system 
interface modules.  In general, these modules extract specific data from 
our database, send it somewhere, poll for a response and then import the 
response back into the database.  They do this with several vendors, 
each with their own data requirments and transport mechanisms.

There's a lot of code reuse possibilities since many of the vendors use 
very similar data formats and HTTP POST transport mechanisms.

Given this, I'm seriously considering implementing the individual pieces 
of this project as ant tasks and processing each request by 
programatically invoking a build script that controls the execution of 
these tasks.  Requests would come into a servlet, which would invoke the 
ant script in a new thread, specifying the ant target that implements 
the particular interface requested.

I'm certainly no ant expert, however.  All I've done is create some 
fairly simple scripts to build and jar java code.  My specific questions 
are...

1)  Can I pipe the xml output of one task into the next task without 
using a file?

2)  Do tasks within a target always run in the order they're specified 
in the build script?

Any other advice or comments are welcome.

Thanks,
Scott




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Re: ant as a workflow engine

[Scott Walters <sc...@integra-online.com>]

Thanks for all the info.  I've been experimenting with writing ant 
tasks, and I'm starting to think that it's a great framework for what 
I'm trying to do.  While I agree that maven would probably be better, I 
could never get even the simplest build script to work after hours of 
trying.  I tried the mailing list and the response was prompt but 
ultimately not helpful.  I may try it again in a few months.  I looked 
at the workflow commons project briefly but since there's no real docs 
for it, I'd have to work with the source extensively to gauge it's 
capabilities and I don't really have a lot of time.

Scott


Stefan Bodewig wrote:
> There is a workflow subproject in jakarta-commons sandbox that may be
> of interest to you ...
> 
> On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, Scott Walters <sc...@integra-online.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>1)  Can I pipe the xml output of one task into the next task without
>>using a file?
> 
> 
> Not easily without touching the tasks, but if you are writing them
> anyway: You could store the XML output (as a DOM tree?) in a project
> reference between tasks.
> 
> 
>>2) Do tasks within a target always run in the order they're
>>specified in the build script?
> 
> 
> Yes.
> 
> Stefan
> 
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> To unsubscribe, e-mail:   <ma...@jakarta.apache.org>
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> 




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Re: ant as a workflow engine

[Stefan Bodewig <bo...@apache.org>]

There is a workflow subproject in jakarta-commons sandbox that may be
of interest to you ...

On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, Scott Walters <sc...@integra-online.com> wrote:

> 1)  Can I pipe the xml output of one task into the next task without
> using a file?

Not easily without touching the tasks, but if you are writing them
anyway: You could store the XML output (as a DOM tree?) in a project
reference between tasks.

> 2) Do tasks within a target always run in the order they're
> specified in the build script?

Yes.

Stefan

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