Workflow enactment with continuation and future objects

Abstract

An increasing number of software developers are turning to workflow to separate the logic and the control aspects in their applications, thus making them more amenable to change. However, in spite of recent efforts to standardize and provide reusable workflow components, many developers build their own. This is a challenging endeavor and involves solving problems which seem incompatible with the object paradigm and current object-oriented programming languages. In the context of an object-oriented workflow framework, this paper demonstrates a novel approach that resolves this impedance mismatch with techniques drawn from programming language theory. This successful cross-pollination narrows the gap between the results of decades of research in programming languages and developers working hard to cope with change.

Process inheritance and instance modification

“…For example, [10] shows how triggers and transactions in an active database system can be used to support processes consisted of multiple activities. [23] presents that how two of Smalltalk's advanced futures, namely continuation and future objects, can be used to build workflow applications.…”

On Composing Asynchronous Operations

“…Research in the domain include: analysis of different strategies for updating future objects [15], proposal for architectures to support asynchronous messages using future objects while preserving the separation between the logic and the control aspects in the implementation [11], design for asynchronous stream generators, extending previous facilities [7], new framework to mimic simple synchronous programming but able to achieve fullflow processing asynchronously [4].…”