Comparison between WWF workflow and self-developed workflow engine

In. in the net field, there are roughly two trends in workflows on the market: one is self-developed, namely self-developed process engines and process platforms, and the other is WWF, that is, Microsoft's WWF.
Understand the situation of Microsoft's WWF as follows:
1. WWF is a set of bottom-layer workflow engines developed by Microsoft. It is relatively bottom-layer. The development process must have a clear understanding of its mechanism. In addition to writing business code, you must also write the code that drives the process. Poor flexibility. If you want to achieve flexible configuration and easy development, you must perform secondary development on this basis to build a WWF-based workflow platform. At present, K2 has developed such a platform, however, I have seen K2 products, and the flexibility is still relatively poor. Most of them can implement conditional flow of processes. code is required for signing such processes, let alone complicated flow.
2. the embedded workflow of sharepoint2007 is also based on WWF. It can only be used as an ordered workflow, that is, to process the workflow like sending an email. The complex state machine process requires visual studio2005. The latter designs the workflow and processes the state for Sharepoint to call. If there are many enterprise processes and the process changes frequently, this method is not flexible.
3. To use the WWF development process, Visual Studio 2005 is an indispensable development tool. If a portal still requires a series of bundled software such as SharePoint 2007, Microsoft's technology is updated quickly, these technologies are new technologies, and the training cost for programmers is relatively high. At present, there are not many programmers proficient in these two technologies.
The following describes the self-developed process engine and process platform:
1. High flexibility. All functions of workflows are implemented based on the foundation. During the design, the features of Chinese enterprises are fully taken into account and complicated process flow can be realized. When the direction of a process branch changes, you only need to configure it through modeling, without modifying the code. The well-known self-development process platform is the liveflow of donglan, which completely achieves zero code and flexible configuration and processing.
2. The self-development method and the WWF method have the same workload, but WWF needs to learn about the WWF mechanism. Regardless of the method, you need to develop a modeling tool that can configure the process and a simple development work platform.
3. self-developed workflow platform is a permanent task. The investment in development is relatively large (but it is generally less investment than the second development with WWF), and the requirements for programmers are relatively high, once completed, programmers who use the platform have low requirements. They only need to make webpages and use configuration tools. However, the flexibility brought by self-development is incomparable.

The comparison results are as follows:
1. When the development difficulty and workload of the two are quite the same, the cost of using WWF to develop workflows is relatively high, which will also increase the customer's cost.
2. self-developed methods can achieve high flexibility and can meet the needs of enterprises with Chinese characteristics. The WWF method implements complex transfer by writing code.
3. The self-development method has little dependence on Microsoft. You only need to use visual studio2005. programmers do not need to master too many technologies. workflow can be the core technology of the company to improve the competitiveness of the company, the process engine can be extracted separately and embedded into any existing system.