investigate different implementations of simple workflows: inheritance/mixin based vs adapters

1. patterns by example - workflow design
jss 2011-06-09

2. Workflows

3. Workflows ctd.
• [Business] Process Modeling
• State Machines [vs. sequential models]
• Directed Graph
• Advanced: WF patterns, branching, concurrency, etc.
• (c.f. http://www.workflowpatterns.com/)

4. Wish List
• Workflow on top of existing instances:
WF(Instance).state_change(‘newstate’)
• No dependencies
• No assumptions about underlying representation - just Python objects
• Hooks for transitions (one is enough, do not need registry)

5. repoze.workflow

6. legacy repoze

7. itools.workflow

8. Implementations
• N Python implementations w/ slightly different ideas
• Framework specific: django-workflows, {plone,hurry,repoze}.workflow
• Zope stuff: Nice adaptation interface
• Framework agnostic: itools.workflow - but inheritance based interface
• Plus some state-machine libs

9. Usage