YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) is a workflow language which can be used for Business Process Management. I found the simplicity of the language very interesting and as it’s based on Petri Nets it’s good modelling!

The YAWL engine is written in Java and is currently in version Beta 7. Where my interest in particular is is how I can apply this language to Ruby on Rails applications.

So what I’m doing at the moment is porting this language to Ruby on Rails so that Rails Apps can use workflows. The idea is that no application code is workflow aware and the workflow engine is not application aware. What would be particulary interesting feature is import/export of .ywl and YAWL-xml documents.

Let’s see how far I get. I’m thinking of open-sourcing the whole code.