A GeoBPMS for GeoBliki 3

Posted by Patrice Cappelaere Sun, 15 Apr 2007 13:58:00 GMT

Just-in time delivery of custom data products is becoming a must to support a broader range of users involved in humanitarian assistance, disaster recovery, emergency management such as fire management.

EO-1 hyperion data can be custom-processed to detect fires, floods, contaminants, oil slicks… This requires sophisticated workflows involving many web services across many organizations and cooperating universities. This technology borrows heavily from the Business Process Management world.

GeoBliki geospatial Business Process Management System (GeoBPMS) is composed of many open source components including Ruby on Rails, OpenWFEru, XForms, Business Rules and a few others…

Many developers have asked for details on how to integrate those components with Rails. Here is our first installment. Based on your feedback, we could take this in many different directions and even start a dialog.

Please, give us some feedback if this strikes your interest or if you have comments/questions/ideas.

We want to hear from you.

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  1. Avatar
    John Mettraux about 10 hours later:

    Hi Pat,

    great document. Where would you like the feedback to go ?

    Best regards,

    John

  2. Avatar
    John Mettraux about 14 hours later:

    some feedback :

    (It’s a great document, but maybe you shouldn’t include my name, I just implemented the workflow engine)

    • maybe the Rails application should be called “geobpms” instead of “openwfe” (page 3)

    • it’s OK to directly write , no quote needed, as you like. (page 5)

    • the parameters for a BlockParticipant are |flowexpression, workitem| (not |fei, workitem|) (page 6)

    • since OpenWFEru 0.9.9, it’s OK to write “wi.params[‘task’]” to get the value for the ‘task’ attribute (page 6)

    • similarly, at page 7, you don’t need to fetch the flow expression to get the value of the ‘task’ attribute, “wi.params[‘task’]” is OK.

    • about logging, I should maybe make the Rails integration more transparent and let OpenWFEru pick Rails logger automatically if present, wdyt ?

    • about the source release of OpenWFEru, 0.9.9 will come as a gem and as a source zip (openwferu-0.9.9-src.zip)

    Thanks a lot for that document, looking forward seeing it grow. Getting back to preparing release 0.9.9.

    Best regards,

    John

  3. Avatar
    pat@geobliki.com 2 days later:

    Thanks for feedback.

    • Still working on 0.9.9 :) to get XForms to work…but will update the document… and already working on the next one.
    • Yes, we are also moving the app to geobpms and its own environment. Stay tuned.
    • Regarding logging, up to you. Sounds good.
    • Like the zip option. We try to stay away from gems as we need to have portable apps to other servers.
    • OpenWFEru is a killer app! Great work!

    V/R,

    Pat.

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