YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) is a new workflow language based on a rigorous analysis of existing workflow management systems and workflow languages.

Project Details

Name of project: YAWL - Yet Another Workflow Language

Brief overview: YAWL is a workflow language built upon experiences with languages supported by contemporary workflow management systems through the Workflow Patterns Initiative. Its design hopefully allows YAWL to be used for the purposes of the study of expressiveness and interoperability issues.

Standards used: XML, XML Schema, XPATH, XQuery, SOAP, WSDL

OSS technologies used:

Infrastructure: The YAWL project uses OSS infrastructure including Sourceforge, Google Code, Apache, DamnSmallLinux.

Development: YAWL itself is an LGPL licensed Open Source project. YAWL relies upon a number of existing OSS projects that provide functionality vital to YAWL, and has meant the YAWL team could focus on the component they needed to build rather than having to reinvent the wheel. YAWL depends on Jgraph, JSF, Apache Tomcat, PostgreSQL, Hibernate, Saxon, JDom, WSIF and Proguard. The development tools used include the Intellij IDEA development suite.

OSS projects contributed to: ProM.

Implementors (internal, external): Internal developers and industry developers both participate in the project.

Conclusions

Rationale of Open Source technologies used:

1) To make research impact (by increasing the chance of uptake).
2) To encourage collaboration with others, both industry partners and
academic partners. Industry partners may for example strengthen parts of the
system that are not yet production class and academic partners may provide
world class research insights.
3) To provide an affordable workflow/BPM solution to the world, that is
based on world class research as well as a strong conceptual and rigorous
foundation. This reduces the TCO of people wanting to implement workflow
systems (which often have quite costly software licensing requirements) and
facilitates high quality solutions.
4) To encourage innovation through research collaboration (an example is the
adaptation of the Woflan tool-set for YAWL).
5) There is the strong cultural preference for universities to share their
knowledge and make it open for scrutiny (thus allowing for feedback). This
is a natural fit with the open-source philosophy. 

Contact Details

Date of case study: Ongoing

State/s: QLD

Name of institute: Queensland University of Technology

Contact person: Arthur ter Hofstede

Contact details: a dot terhofstede at qut dot edu dot au

URLs (project and institute): Details of the project are available at  http://www.yawlfoundation.org and the Sourceforge page is http://sourceforge.net/projects/yawl.