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Abstract:
Advanced e-services require efficient, flexible, and easy-to-use workflow
technology that integrates well with mainstream Internet technologies such as
XML and Web servers. This paper discusses an XML-enabled architecture for
distributed workflow management that is implemented in the latest version of
our Mentor-lite prototype system. The key asset of this architecture is an XML
mediator that handles the exchange of business and flow control data between
workflow and business-object servers on the one hand and client activities on
the other via XML messages over http. Our implementation of the mediator has
made use of Oracle's XSQL servlet. The major benefit of the advocated
architecture is that it provides seamless integration of client applications
into e-service workflows with scalable efficiency and very little explicit
coding, in contrast to an earlier, Java-based, version of our Mentor-lite
prototype that required much more code and exhibited potential performance
problems.
