Kapil Thangavelu <kthangavelu@earthlink.net> wrote: The PTK has been undergoing radical changes as of late. Its worth taking another look at as the current design is much more supportive of alternative workflow designs. Disclamer: This is my gleaming -- I could be off. I have done a keyword search on the Zope-PTK list for workflow to understand the recent discussion on workflow design within PTK. It seems to me that workflow is tied to strongly with documents in the design plan. In the model of workflow being discussed there, documents march through workflow steps. What if a workflow step is a computation and requires multiple data sources to be done? Instead, a workflow step needs to have an explicit representation with data items (documents) associated with it having some kind of version info associated with them. This need comes from the use cases that I deal with in setting up workflow for science and engineering computation. For a good review of workflow requirements see: http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/endeavors/docs/AdvancedWorkflow.pdf It would be nice if the workflow system understood how to act in a distributed way, like what SWAP, (an XML based protocol -- think webdav for workflow -- for distributing workflow) is trying to do: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ietfswap/swap-prot.txt and the later work, Wf-XML by WFMC. This in turn is based on early WFMC's efforts. See the workflow & internet white paper and reference model at: http://www.aiim.org/wfmc/finalwp.pdf http://www.aiim.org/wfmc/standards/docs/tc003v11.pdf There are models (some UML) contained within that would be useful to use as guides for patterns for workflow I believe. Yours in workflow, Albert Boulanger aboulanger@vpatch.com