Re: Workflow Management

[Ted Husted <hu...@apache.org>]

I've spent some time with this, and it's a truly stellar package ;-)

Any plans regarding the Registry interface and base class? For testing
purposes, I put one together using Activities as a base (annexed), and
reserved namespace for adding processes later. The base class implements
a FastHashMap for the Activities, following what Struts does for
Actions. I'll commit it if it doesn't conflict with any immediate plans.

I'm trying to hack together a Struts version, and add a demo to
Struts-Simple with my other wizard demos, but would like more than one
activity to play with ;-)

So far, I split the servlet into a "service" component to load the
Registry/Activities, and put the code that executed the Steps in to an
Action. So the model I'm working on here is the one where there is one
Struts Action to handle all the Acivities (though I'm thinking there
will be different mappings, for the local forwards).

Three excrutiately minor things: 

1. Do we want to use http for a package name instead of web, to
reinforce the relationship with the Sun packages? 

2. BaseScope.remove() seems only to remove the object from the
LOCAL_SCOPE, rather than all scopes as documented. Should I fix that, or
am I missing something?

3. BaseContextBean declares HashMap scopes but doesn't seem to use it. I
don't understand JPath well enough to tell if it needs to use it or not.

-- Ted Husted, Husted dot Com, Fairport NY USA.
-- Custom Software ~ Technical Services.
-- Tel +1 716 737-3463
-- http://www.husted.com/about/struts/

Re: Workflow Management

["Craig R. McClanahan" <cr...@apache.org>]

On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Ted Husted wrote:

> Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 14:04:42 -0400
> From: Ted Husted <hu...@apache.org>
> To: struts-dev@jakarta.apache.org
> Subject: Re: Workflow Management
>
> I've spent some time with this, and it's a truly stellar package ;-)
>

Thanks ;-)

> Any plans regarding the Registry interface and base class? For testing
> purposes, I put one together using Activities as a base (annexed), and
> reserved namespace for adding processes later. The base class implements
> a FastHashMap for the Activities, following what Struts does for
> Actions. I'll commit it if it doesn't conflict with any immediate plans.
>

I've got a basic Registry implementation sitting on my disk -- I'll go
ahead and commit it.  It doesn't have any built-in mechanism to read in
the activities - do you think that should be from a single XML file, or
from a file per activity?

> I'm trying to hack together a Struts version, and add a demo to
> Struts-Simple with my other wizard demos, but would like more than one
> activity to play with ;-)
>

It's not the only way to do it, but my thinking was to define a separate
Action per activity that your application supports.  That way, you could
do things like focus on a single activity at a time, and not have fights
between your developers over the one-and-only activity definition file
(like the fights that can happen now over struts-config.xml).

> So far, I split the servlet into a "service" component to load the
> Registry/Activities, and put the code that executed the Steps in to an
> Action. So the model I'm working on here is the one where there is one
> Struts Action to handle all the Acivities (though I'm thinking there
> will be different mappings, for the local forwards).
>

That (local forwards) is another reason I liked Action-per-activity
instead.  But it's not clear what the best approach will be -- having it
both ways will let us experiment and figure that out.

> Three excrutiately minor things:
>
> 1. Do we want to use http for a package name instead of web, to
> reinforce the relationship with the Sun packages?
>

Personally, I find "web" a bunch easier to type, and to pronounce out
loud, than "http" :-)

> 2. BaseScope.remove() seems only to remove the object from the
> LOCAL_SCOPE, rather than all scopes as documented. Should I fix that, or
> am I missing something?
>

Go ahead and fix it if you want - I will make sure you have commit privs
on the commons sandbox.  Don't forget to add yourself to the developer
list in the status doc.

> 3. BaseContextBean declares HashMap scopes but doesn't seem to use it. I
> don't understand JPath well enough to tell if it needs to use it or not.
>

Nope, it doesn't ... that was a leftover from a previous design iteration.
It can be removed (along with the import for HashMap).

Craig

PS:  There's also occasional discussion of this component on the
commons-dev list -- at least for the stuff that is not Struts-specific.