Closer to the state of this art

Ahh, now that's more like it. The State of Workflow by Tom Baeyens article on JBoss.com seems like a fairly inclusive yet honest appraisal of what is happening in the workflow space. I was going to say "currently", but the article was written in 2004. Still, it is a lot more relevant than some of those university papers I skimmed from the early 90's.



JBoss is a middleware product suite from the open source comany RedHat, and they seem to still be fairly active in that area. The relevant module for workflow is known as jBPM, but the great thing about the article is that is covers so many concepts, technologies, and comapnies.



Well worth spending the time to read Tom's introductory sections and there are a number of useful reference link sections for handy research starting points

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The first of the "Workflow" standards organisations

Right now I will admit that including the term "Workflow" in my initial 're-'search keywords does drag along far too much baggage. I remember previous attempts to find valuable resources digging up all sorts of things along these lines.



The problem is that "Workflow" is one of those buzzwords that has been around 10-15 years (probably longer in those famous and well-bankrolled Californian research centers) but has still yet to really strike a seam of gold. So all sorts of ideas and solutions have been generated, especially in the earlier days - and although they have been valid enough to trickle along generating just enough revenue to survive, they have never really flourished into the maintstream.



So I have trawled through far too many mid nineties whitepapers, and hit quite a few pre-and-post-millenial companies and products that have gathered dust but not merited further attention. And finally I have come across a true starting point for research at the Workflow Management Coalition. I am not holding my breath, but it will give me at least one view of the state of the art, even if it does turn out to be slightly rusty or out on a limb. I have a feeling I may come across a number of these, but its better than anything I have come across so far. The main resources of interest seem to be at WfMC Free Downloads and in the links around the page.

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