[[alternative]]Towards the Reusability of Object-Oriented Workflow Management Systems

[[abstract]]In this paper, we focus on the reusability of the components of workflow management systems (WfMSs). Languages that support object-oriented programming now are firmly entrenched in the mainstream. The object-oriented programming language provides support for three key languages features: abstract data types, inheritance, and dynamic binding. As a result, these languages can support the software reuse. According to our study, implementing WfMS in object-oriented programming languages without considering the characteristics of the WfMSs does not always obtain reusable components. We clarify the reusability of WfMSs and point out the difficulties for constructing reusable components for WfMSs. To overcome these difficulties, we propose an object-oriented model for WfMSs named “Java-based Object-Oriented Workflow Management System (JOO-WfMS)”. In JOO-WfMS, we use design patterns for system architecture and components to promote the reusability. Besides, we propose a language, called workflow failure-handling (WfFH) language, to support a flexible failure recovery model in JOO-WfMS. For the design of user communication interfaces, we use user communication components (UCC) to promote the reusability. We also report our experiences in constructing the prototype of JOO-WfMS and experimental results.