posted on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 10:37 AM
by
Jonathan Hodgson
Four tenets of Workflow
Most developers/architects are used to the
four tenets of Service-Orientated design now. There is a great writeup on MSDN in the "
Principles of Service Design: Service Patterns and Anti-Patterns" paper on designing services and helping you stay away from anti-patterns like CRUDy & loosey goosey interfaces to better document and messaging patterns.
Well reading the first Windows Workflow Foundation book it's speaks about four tenets of workflow.
- Tenet 1: Workflows coordinate work performed by people and software.
- Tenet 2: Workflows are long running and stateful.
- Tenet 3: Workflows are based on extensible models.
- Tenet 4: Workflows are transparent and dynamic through their lifecycle.
John Evdemon goes into
each of these with a full explanation.
Whilst on the subject of WWF, Brian Loesgen has a great table
comparing Biztalk and WWF, the basic point being think
Biztalk as workflow across applications and WWF within applications.