ruote 2.1.11 released

ruote is an open source workflow engine implemented in Ruby.

It takes as input process definitions and interprets them. It routes work among participants according to the flow described in those process definitions. It can orchestrate ping pong matches as well.

The main motivation behind this release is Torsten being tired of advising people to use ruote edge (thanks Bundler) for their ruote-kit installs, ruote was more than ripe for a new release. This version includes the result of the feedback of numerous people, as the changelog can attest.

I’ll address here two aspects, one in ruote itself, and one on its periphery.

participant in a workflow

Up until now, participants were registered one by one (order of registration matters).

engine.register_participant 'reception', Acme::ReceptionParticipant
engine.register_participant 'support', Acme::SupportParticipant
engine.register_participant '.+', Ruote::StorageParticipant

Torsten came up with an idiomatic solution in ruote-kit, that was soon promoted to ruote itself :

engine.register do
  reception Acme::ReceptionParticipant
  support Acme::SupportParticipant
  catchall
end

All is well in a vanilla world were participants are all known at system startup. People were asking about adding participants on-the-fly. Ruote has always been able to do that :

engine.register_participant 'reception2', Acme::ReceptionParticipant, :site => 'two'

but our reception2 gets registered after the catchall participant, and thus might never receive any workitems. A solution would be to place the participant as second to last :

engine.register_participant(
  'reception2', Acme::ReceptionParticipant, :site => 'two', :position => -2)

But blindly inserting participants isn’t good. Ruote 2.1.11 has a new method for setting the participant list in a single batch :

engine.participant_list = [
  [ '^reception$', 'Acme::ReceptionParticipant', {} ],
  [ '^reception2$', 'Acme::ReceptionParticipant', { 'site' => 'two' } ],
  [ '^support$', 'Acme::SupportParticipant', {} ],
  [ '^.+$', 'Ruote::StorageParticipant', {} ]
]

Very rough, but full control.

ruote in kit

ruote-kit was kind of left behind at version 2.1.8. Torsten and I resumed its development and brought it to 2.1.11.

Ruote-kit is a web administration console for ruote. Kenneth Kalmer’s genius idea was to make it a rack middleware (component), so that it works standalone or fits nicely in a rails application, under /_ruote/

Ruote-kit is more than a web administration console, it’s also an HTTP/JSON based interface to ruote, for example : http://gist.github.com/611044. The entry point of the interface is /_ruote/ all the resources are linked to from this “root”. The links are annotated with “rel” attributes that indicate to clients what stands behind the link.

There is more to it, we’re working on conveying the capabilities of both interfaces HTML / JSON from the HTML (the one that is easily navigated by a human and his browser).

storages got updates

ruote-dm, ruote-redis, ruote-couch have been upgraded to 2.1.11.

Note that there is a piece of documentation on how to implement storages that is in the works as it was requested by people who want to have a MongoDB backend.

next steps

Still have to release an updated ruote-amqp, and bring ruote-beanstalk to 2.1.11. Then it will be time to think about 2.1.12. As said, there is still work to do on ruote-kit, and since it’s used by many ruote people, it deserves full attention.

Many thanks to Eric Platon, Nathan Stults, Asier, Hartog de Mik, Brett Anthoine, Eric Smith, Kaspar Schiess, David Greaves, Rich Meyers, Kenneth Kalmer, Don French and David Goodlad (and many others) for their contributions !

source : http://github.com/jmettraux/ruote
mailing list : http://groups.google.com/group/openwferu-users
doc : http://ruote.rubyforge.org
irc : #ruote on freenode.net