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General purpose work flow languages

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Abstract

Work flow management requires language support for work flow specification and task specification. Many approaches and systems for work flow management therefore offer at least one new language for work flow specification; task specification is usually done in a traditional language. This is motivated in particular by the fact that many components already exist and the task of the work flow tool is the specification of the interaction between these components. The intention of this article is to demonstrate that a general purpose programming language can serve both aspects. We do not really see the need to develop yet another language that a user or application programmer must learn. If an existing programming language like C or Prolog is extended towards work flow capabilities, it is easy to reuse autonomous existing software components and to build interfaces among them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Languages, University of Technology Vienna, Argentinierstraße 8, 1040, Wien, Austria Europe

    Alexander Forst & Eva Kühn

  2. Department of Computer Sciences, Indiana Center for Database Systems, Purdue University, 47907, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Omran Bukhres

Authors
  1. Alexander Forst
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  2. Eva Kühn
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  3. Omran Bukhres
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Additional information

Recommended by: Omran Bukhres and e. Kühn

The work is supported by the Austrian FWF (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung), project “Multidatabase Transaction Processing”, contract number P9020-PHY in cooperation with the NSF (National Science Foundation).

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Forst, A., Kühn, E. & Bukhres, O. General purpose work flow languages. Distrib Parallel Databases 3, 187–218 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01277645

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