The BileBlog

Woe is me, another guest entry! This time harpooning poor OSWorkflow…

I’m watching Hani Suleiman talk. Surprisingly, his hands are NOT buried in his jeans, which is probably a good thing considering how ratty said jeans are. Plus, watching Hani play pocket pool isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. I’d rather buy really, really expensive tap water and pour it on the floor.

So far, he’s blathering on about stuff that isn’t workflow, and some stuff that is. It’s really cool that the TSS powers-that-be put Gavin King and Hani not only side by side, but that Hani says that workflow is NOT for web apps, while Gavin uses workflow in Seam… a web app framework. Here at TSSJS, the fun never ends. Or starts.

Now he’s pointing out all the integration points. “Yes, you can screw OSWorkflow in any hole you like. Pick one. Of many.” Reminds me of Hani. But now he’s saying OSWorkflow talks to Spring, Quartz, web services, hibernate, EJB, memory (which he said early on was probably a bad idea, saying in memory processes probably weren’t workflow), quartz (cheap rock, indeed), and other stuff. It’s really cool how he whines about all these projects… but uses them.

Now he’s droning about core concepts. Steps, actions, results, functions, conditions. By now there are maybe four people that aren’t asleep in the room. And I’m asleep. This is almost exciting, provided you like to watch grass growing, or maybe paint drying. Or maybe you like watching the glue you just sniffed drying.

What he’s not done is “associate a workflow status with an object” yet. He’s using XML on the screen, which means you can’t actually see what the XML text is. That’s good, because let’s be real, the XML sucks, but it’s bad, because he’s actually trying to communicate real data. It’s like if his presentation was audio only, without a necessary video part, it would be really cool… provided he read aloud all the XML. That’d probably drive us all straight to the boobyhatch, though.

Who am I kidding? This is the bileblog, most of us belong in the boobyhatch anyway.

His text really is good. Now if he could only stop lisping. His limp-wristed delivery is almost as amusing as the bileblog. I’m waiting for the audience to go “BOOOOOOO!!!! Go-RILLA!” or “AAAAAARRRGGGGH!!!!! Go-RILLA!” or “HISSSSSSSSS! Mon-KEY!” depending on what geographic area they’re from.

He’s surprisingly informative if you’re trying to learn about workflow, OSWorkflow in particular. He’s actually addressing real issues, which is better than I expected. I can’t wait for him to take it out of the abstract and into the concrete… aw, who am I kidding? When he’s done with the informative part, he’s going to jump around in his new Geronimo thong. He promised.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.