Now that I have a bit more time I am going to revisit the work manager application I wrote about 12 months ago. I did promise I was going to attempt to integrate it with some of the BPMS systems in particular the Intalio and ActiveBPEL offerings. I am particularly interested in Intalio’s recent acquisition of FiveSight and am curious to see how it all goes. In particular I am keen to test out their eclipse based BPMN designer, which generates BPEL code and runs on the PXE server.

A lot has happened in the 12 months since I last worked on this project so I will eventually need to port to hibernate3 and Maven but for the time being it will have to be hibernate2 and Ant running on a Jakarta Tomcat server v5.0.25.

I’m still missing a GUI to render work items and support human interaction with the work manager server. There are a heap of options these days from Tapestry to Echo, both support AJAX and both can be used to develop snazzy zero-admin style applications that run within a browser. I believe that Echo’s support for different browsers is superior to Tapestry’s. As you may imagine there is a lot of JavaScript behind Echo whereas Tapestry offers component based gui development, which can incorporate JavaScript and AJAX style interaction.

The work manager is a generic reusable service, one of the most fundamental when it comes to developing process oriented applications (POA).

More news as i swing back into it.