Ruote is a Ruby workflow engine. It’s thus a workflow definition interpreter. If you’re enterprisey, you might say business process definition.

Instances of these definitions are meant to run for a long time, so Ruote is oriented towards persistency / modifiability instead of transience / performance like a regular interpreter is. A Ruote engine may run multiple instances of workflow definitions.

Persistent mostly means that you can stop Ruote and later restart it without losing processes. Modifiability means that you can modify a workflow instance on the fly.

Process definitions are mainly describing how workitems are routed to participants. These participants may represent worklists for users or group of users, pieces of code, …

grab ruote

gem install ruote
gem install yajl-ruby

Then

require 'rubygems'
require 'ruote'
require 'ruote/storage/fs_storage'

# preparing the engine

engine = Ruote::Engine.new(
  Ruote::Worker.new(
    Ruote::FsStorage.new('ruote_work')))

# registering participants

engine.register_participant :alpha do |workitem|
  workitem.fields['message'] = { 'text' => 'hello !', 'author' => 'Alice' }
end

engine.register_participant :bravo do |workitem|
  puts "I received a message from #{workitem.fields['message']['author']}"
end

# defining a process

pdef = Ruote.process_definition :name => 'test' do
  sequence do
    participant :alpha
    participant :bravo
  end
end

# launching, creating a process instance

wfid = engine.launch(pdef)

engine.wait_for(wfid)
  # blocks current thread until our process instance terminates

# => 'I received a message from Alice'

see github.com/jmettraux/ruote/tree/master/test

MIT

• ruote.rubyforge.org

• github.com/jmettraux/ruote

• jmettraux.wordpress.com (blog)

• mailing list : groups.google.com/group/openwferu-users

• irc : irc.freenode.net #ruote