Building Workflow Business Objects

Abstract

OMG is in the final stages of defining the Workflow Management Facility. The facility represents an important building block for a business component infrastructure; it provides a framework for workflow business components that enable realization business processes in a business component environment. Workflow components take care of the overall process logic of a business process, enable monitoring of workflow execution and support flexible combination of reusable business components into workflow applications. We will describe the key concepts of the Workflow Management Facility specification, discuss implementation options for this facility, and explain how to build distributed workflow applications within the framework of such a facility. In addition, we will discuss future extensions to the workflow standard in the areas of resource management and workflow process definition.