Class library support for workflow environments and applications

Workflow systems are receiving increased attention as they intend to facilitate the operations of enterprises by coordinating and streamlining business activities. The need for automated support and operational models that allow workflow applications to coordinate units of work across 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 (TOWE) for programming workflow activities. The novelty of our approach resides in the proposed unified abstraction, class libraries, to support workflow activities. The fundamental concept used in the TOWE system is based on the symbiosis of object-oriented programming and interprocess communication concepts. In TOWE, the concurrency abstractions are represented by process objects, active objects acting as processes, which involve asynchronous, location-independent, and application specific process invocations.