CLASS LIBRARY SUPPORT FOR WORKFLOW ENVIRONMENTS AND APPLICATIONS

Workflow systems are receiving increased attention as they intend to f acilitate the operations of enterprises by coordinating and streamlini ng business activities. The need for automated support and operational models that allow workflow applications to coordinate units of work a cross multiple servers-according to business defined rules and routes- is becoming critical for the proper management of such activities. In this paper, we describe a Transaction-Oriented Workflow Environment (T OWE) for programming workflow activities. The novelty of our approach resides in the proposed unified abstraction, class libraries, to suppo rt workflow activities. The fundamental concept used in the TOWE syste m is based on the symbiosis of object-oriented programming and interpr ocess communication concepts. In TOWE, the concurrency abstractions ar e represented by process objects, active objects acting as processes, which involve asynchronous, location-independent, and application spec ific process invocations.