RainMan: a workflow system for the internet
USITS'97 Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems on USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems
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This paper is to answer for the question on the title. It proposes and implements a novel type of workflow client that is designated for supporting workflow administrative functionality and monitoring services. Almost all the traditional workflow management systems provide two types of operational user interfaces -- the build-time client and the run-time client. Especially, the run-time client provides a working environment for users and incorporates process-level services in terms of the administration and monitoring aspect. However, according to the considerations of emerging transactional workflow applications and distributed workflow enactment architectures, we have frequently recognized that it is necessary for the workflow administration and monitoring services to be taken apart from the run-time client, because the statistical information rather than the status information is much more important in the transactional workflows consisting of a set of transactions, and the administrative functionality needs to be much more sophisticated for the distributed workflow engine components. These mean simultaneously that the run-time client ought to be much heavier, which should be opposite for the recent trend pursuing the light client over the internet. Conclusively, what we create a designated workflow client makes much sense not only if it is appropriately featured for the advanced monitoring functions, but also if it is able to be easily extended to accommodate the system-level administrative features. That is, a new type of workflow client, which is functionally designated only for the administration and monitoring services, is required for satisfying those new functional demands. We call it "Admon-time client". This paper illustrates how to construct the admon-time client and its operational architecture, how the admon-time co-operates with the run-time as well as the build-time, and how to build the operational user interfaces for it. Finally, the transactional workflow administration monitoring system built in this paper is genetically characterized as fully dispersed (distributed) architectures, conceptually supporting the transactional workflow model, physically implemented by the object-oriented methodology with JAVA and CORBA technology, and fully operational on a web-based environment.