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I'm a developer that has spent most of his professional career in the Oracle world with extremely brief detours into JAVA, JavaScript, C#, shell scripting and Python.
Current areas of expertise are Oracle APEX, Data Model Design, PL/SQL, Oracle REST with a little performance tuning thrown in.
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Quite some time ago I was asked by a customer how we could track the changes to a row over time. They had a couple of very important tables for which they wanted to keep track of who changed what. The interesting thing was that they were not interest...
There are many times when you're coding an application where there is a requirement for seed data that is required for the system to run correctly. If the seed data is changed or missing, some programming functions will fail due to the missing data. ...
This article was first published on blogs.oracle.com in September of 2019. Not long after it was published I was made aware of a couple of security flaws. However by that time the underlying blogging platform Oracle was using had been migrated and I ...
In honor of #JoelKallmanDay, I thought I’d break back into blogging after a long hiatus with an update on some of my more popular posts of the past – Oracle APEX and Workflow. In January of 2018, I kicked off a little personal research project. The g...
After my initial post about this, I had a discussion with John Snyders of HardLikeSoftware fame, and it turns out there is a better and more efficient way to maintain the tree state. While what I outlined definitely works, what follows is the “prefer...
Although I’ve been quiet as of late with regard to my “All-The-Things” workflow project, that doesn’t mean I’ve been sitting idle. No, in fact I’ve been running in circles at quite an alarming rate.
My last related post mentioned that I was ordering and would be reading “BPMN Method & Style” by Bruce Silver to try to get a better handle on BPMN. Little did I know the rabbit hole I was sending myself down.
I read it… twice! The first time was to get a handle on what BPMN really is, how it is intended to be used, and who it is aimed at. The second time was … Well, let me explain.
The book, although relatively small at 259 pages, is packed with extreme amounts of information. It includes history on BPMN and the author’s involvement in its guidance and definition, what makes “good” and “bad” BPMN and introduces the notation itself along with rules and guidelines for use. The author’s premise is that, armed with the same information about a process, if two very different people were to be given this information and the details outlined in his book, they would draw the same model. A lofty (if not virtually unattainable) goal.
The real kick in the gut comes when you reach Parts IV and V – The BPMN Implementor’s Guide (for Non-Executable and Executable BPMN respectively). The first section talks about serializing the model and the implied data flow, how to store it, reinstate it, etc. The second section talks about all things related to interpreting the model’s executability and the implied data flow therein, including differentiating between human-executed and automatable tasks, assignments, etc.
When it came time to talk about reference implementations, the author chose BonitaSoft Open Source, which was part of my review of the competition. Mr. Silver walks through some example models and drills down into the data collected to make the tasks executable and/or automatable. He also exposes the XML serialization of the different parts of the model, the captured data and variables and some of the built-in function definitions available in the BonitaSoft product.
To say that the XSD that outlines the XML Serialization is confusing is akin to saying that the principles of thermodynamics are “a bit troublesome”. But in all honesty, it needs to be complex. The enormity of the possible process definitions (and models that represent them) requires it to be so. The problem is that you can’t really cut this down to a “manageable” group. Even if you were to limit the possible number of symbols available in the model to Mr. Silver’s “Level 1 Pallet”, you’d still have an enormous job to do.
It was at this point that I put the book down and walked away. I wasn’t necessarily giving up. I just needed to absorb what I had read. Digest it, ruminate on it.
The book sat on my desk for a number of weeks. Occasionally I would pick it up, flip through to a section that I had a question about. Or even flip to a random section and see if luck or fate would provide any serendipitous insight.
Finally, about 2 weeks ago, I picked it up again and read it in full. This time, the core of what was being explained wasn’t what I was focused on. Instead I was focusing on how BPMN in general fits in to the project I had in mind, and whether it was forcing me outside of the parameters I had set for the project.
To remind you (and myself) of what those parameters are, here they are again:
At the end of the second reading, i was deflated. My initial excitement at BPMN’s potential to provide the framework for a flexible, understandable and well documented workflow engine with a solid commons based UI had turned in to a sense of dread to even move forward. So much complexity and work would be added just by introducing BPMN that the end product would not only not be simple, but would force the end user to learn a notation language that could take months if not years to master.
Looking back at the parameters I had set for this project I realized that not only would I completely shatter the first two in the list, it would mean that the time it would take to release anything useful would be extreme, even if i was working on it full time.
So I am at a crossroads. I have multiple paths ahead of me and I’m not sure which one to take. But since you’re on this journey with me, you can help me decide. As I see it, my choices are as follows:
So here’s your chance. I make no promises, but I’m definitely interested in your opinion. Let me know what you think! The poll will be open through July 14, 2018.
Poll Results:
