Review of First OSWorkflow Book

I can’t believe it’s been over 8 years since I first went from “open source user” to “open source developer”, but it was all the way back in 1999 when I released OSWorkflow, which was based on my work at Cisco Systems developing a document management system, to the open source world. It was designed to be a simple, easy-to-use workflow system based on the principles of the “finite state machine”.

While it was considered lower level than other competing business process solutions, it actually got quite a bit of traction due to it’s simplicity and the fact that instead of using big “businessy” terms that other offerings used to describe themselves, it never hid what it was: a core finite state machine engine designed to make it easy to manage the workflow of many entities (people, issues, documents, etc).

Since then, OSWorkflow has been a pretty good success: a GUI for creating workflows was built, the development team evolved beyond just me (in fact, I haven’t been involved in the project directly for 5+ years), became the core of the super-popular JIRA issue tracker, and now it has it’s own book.

As the original creator of OSWorkflow, I was given a copy of the book and read through it the other day. In addition to the tremendous pride at seeing the contents in print, I was actually surprised to learn many new things about OSWorkflow. The book covers topics such as complex branching, rules engine integration, Spring integration (Spring didn’t exist back when I used OSWorkflow!), and even tie in to those complex business process solutions I never quite “got”.

Overall, the book is an excellent guide to OSWorkflow and building workflow systems in Java in general. You can learn more about it here and buy it from Amazon here.