enhydra application

["Renzo Tomaselli" <renzo.tomaselli@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,
    I'm an italian consultant in the field of distributed document
management system.
Since several years, I'm involved into the design of a new distributed DMS,
CORBA-based, for a Swiss customer.
This system includes an own OO database, with full transactional support and
asyncronous event management.
Platforms are Win, Solaris, Linux and Aix. There is a full strong
authentication structure, as well as a PKI subsystem. Access control is
role-based. Publishing occurs through a java wrapper.
The entire system is written in C++ through UML modelling for all public
(e.g. CORBA) interfaces.
Now I'm planning to step forward along the automation way, thus I would
approach the inclusion of a workflow engine.
I'm monitoring Internet since years about this topic, so I reached Enhydra.
What I'm looking for concerns engine capabilities of instantiating and
running flow templates according to some formal modelling. Our OODMBS would
take care of all persistence aspects (we can store and index anything can be
represented by a CORBA value) as well as transaction management, access
control and event generation.
I would appreciate any comment about suitability of Enhydra to cover that
role. For the moment we are not concerned with J2EE wrapping, we just
publish through a proprietary java API on top of CORBA idl-java mapping. The
hard work is carried out by an architecture of C++ components.
There are a couple of issues I cannot understand from Enhydra overview:
- thread management, especially for concurrent tasks.
- existence of any formal (e.g. semantically analyzed) modelling - such as
Petri nets - and any implied validation of workflows.
I'm focusing on engine capabilities (e.g. a coordinator), while tools for
designing, logging, etc. are less important in this phase.
Thanks,
                          Renzo Tomaselli
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  e-mail: renzo.tomaselli@xxxxxxxxxx
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