Important Note

Active development on ruote ceased.

See scaling down ruote.

Do not involve ruote in your new project.

** 2016-12-12 Update **

Ruote development moved to a new Ruby workflow engine named flor.

The team is named floraison and there is also a "flor behind Rack" project named flack.

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 yajl-ruby
gem install rufus-scheduler -v 2.0.24
gem install ruote

or better, use a Gemfile like this one: https://gist.github.com/jmettraux/22f24fca70c5a116b01c

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 http://github.com/jmettraux/ruote/tree/master/test

MIT

• http://ruote.rubyforge.org
• http://github.com/jmettraux/ruote
• http://jmettraux.wordpress.com (blog)

• mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/openwferu-users
• irc: irc.freenode.net #ruote