Overview

Detailed documentation will be available shortly after release. In the meantime this page describes the overall architecture.

Architecture

 

Workflow4people has a workflow and forms component. The components communicate through web services. You can easily use each component separately if you want to. And what's more, you can easily integrate these components with other web service based components.

Forms

We use Orbeon for the web forms. Orbeon is a server-side XForms solution which makes it possible to use XForms that are exposed as ordinary web forms through any browser.

Forms can vary from a simple 3-field remark intake to a 20-page form wizard for a building permit.

Orbeon also offers XML pipelines which are used for instance to communicate with web services.

Orbeon forms are used to present tasks to users, provide overviews of tasks and to deliver reports.

The task models are defined as XML Schema documents. Orbeon performs validation of the forms in realtime.

If you are using Orbeon Forms in an Intranet environment you can use single sign on using Active Directory.

 

Workflow

The workflow component consists of a Grails application that embeds jBPM. jBPM is the renowned workflow solution from the JBoss Group. It offers a mature solution for the execution of complex (and simple) workflows. Workflows are defined graphically through either an external designer or an integrated browser-based designer.

Workflows are exposed as web services and can themselves utilize web services. You can run Groovy actions from a workflow node.