Ruote as orchestration engine

[Lukáš Zapletal]

Hello,

I am coming from enterprise integration backgound (Tibco
BusinessWorks, webMethods Integration Server) and I am currently
working on a project that integrates other three projects using REST
(project Katello - www.katello.org). It's written in Ruby on Rails and
we use delayed_jobs for many tasks since lots of processes are slow
(repository synchronizations, imports of certificate collections etc).

I think it would be good idea to leverage an orchestration engine and
since the project is written in Ruby, it would be best to have a ruby
library for that. After some digging on the Ruote site, it looks like
BPM engine for me (people are involved, processes are long-term),
while I am probably looking for lower-level (machine-level)
integration where processes are short-term (finishes in seconds or
minutes, suspended only when there are expectional states).

Is Ruote good fit for me? Do you have any other tips for something
more lightweight? I am thinking about implementing something myself
maybe, but I did not think much about how to implement process
suspending (save processing pipeline and current call state into
database/file). May be challenging.

[John Mettraux]

Hello Lukáš,

welcome to ruote's mailing list.

On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 02:48:48PM -0700, Lukáš Zapletal wrote:
>
> I am coming from enterprise integration backgound (Tibco
> BusinessWorks, webMethods Integration Server) and I am currently
> working on a project that integrates other three projects using REST
> (project Katello - www.katello.org). It's written in Ruby on Rails and
> we use delayed_jobs for many tasks since lots of processes are slow
> (repository synchronizations, imports of certificate collections etc).
>
> I think it would be good idea to leverage an orchestration engine and
> since the project is written in Ruby, it would be best to have a ruby
> library for that. After some digging on the Ruote site, it looks like
> BPM engine for me (people are involved, processes are long-term),
> while I am probably looking for lower-level (machine-level)
> integration where processes are short-term (finishes in seconds or
> minutes, suspended only when there are expectional states).

Ruote can do that as well. In my day job, we're using ruote to orchestrate
web services (JSON over HTTP ones, not the SOAP

Participants in ruote workflows are not always human beings. Seconds and
minutes workflow instances are ok.

> Is Ruote good fit for me?

Sorry, I don't know enough about you and your context to answer that
question.

I'd say that spending some time building a prototype, proof of concept,
exploring, would help you determine that.

> Do you have any other tips for something
> more lightweight?

Maybe something like: https://github.com/thinkerbot/tap

I've seen other Rake based work-flow tools, but I can't remember their names.

> I am thinking about implementing something myself
> maybe, but I did not think much about how to implement process
> suspending (save processing pipeline and current call state into
> database/file). May be challenging.

All the best,

--
John Mettraux - http://lambda.io/processi

[Lukáš Zapletal]

Thank you for information, I will dig in the Ruoute and do some
testing.