History

About Eazflow

Eazflow is an '''open source workflow application''' brought to you by Zmok. It provides a web application platform for workflows - long -running multi-actor processes within organizations.

Our design focus for Eazflow was on
  • flexible definition of workflows,
  • easy integration with external applications,
  • good usability and a quick learning phase.

We consider these, together with a standard application platform (Java), to be the critical success factors of a successful workflow solution.

Eazflow is built upon Grails web application framework, using Groovy programming language. It will run in any Java web application server supported by Grails.
Grails and Groovy represent a fresh agile stream in the Java world, inspired by famous Ruby on Rails. While being strongly oriented on standards and reuse (JSR 241, Hibernate ORM, Spring), they try to bring joy and productivity back to web application development, and gradually, they succeed.

Eazflow is one of the first real-world Grails application samples, published with open source on Grails. It has been harvested and refactored from a real world application, and we plan to further develop it in a community driven effort. Our engineers have put weeks of hard earned experience into it, you may thus use it as a reference, cookbook and best practice guide for Grails applications.

Terminology

Eazflow manages long running ''processes'', consisting of ''activities''. In each ''activity'', a ''user'' may read or edit a set of ''variables'', and then choose a ''transition'' into another ''activity''.
  • ''Process'' is the container of a workflow. Multiple process instances (run processes) may be based on one process definition.
  • ''Activity'' is a step in a process. Its definition may give details of what is expected in this step - a user action, background system operation, process termination, etc.
  • ''Variables'' create a tree of structured information collected during given process.
  • ''Transitions'' are named connections from one activity into another.

For details, see EazflowReference.

References

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