stonepath

State-based workflow for rails.

Stonepath is the name of a workflow modeling methodology pioneered in applications written in the late 1990's and early 2000's for the U.S. State Department to support import/export control in the Former Soviet Union Countries.

Stonepath has since been refined in several dozen applications for Government and commercial clients.

Stonepath was also the name of a gem implementing Stonepath as a domain-specific-language on top of ActiveRecord.

ActiveRecord maps to the Stonepath convention very well (see some of the included docs). So well, in fact, several of us at CodeSherpas experimentd with building a DSL that mapped ActiveRecord concepts to the Stonepath terminology. for instance the Stonepath concept of a Workitem 'Owner' maps to 'belongs_to :user' very well.

But ActiveRecord changed considerably between the many versions of rails since it was written, and maintaining it seemed more trouble that it was worth; it became easier just to teach the workflow concepts and use ActiveRecord for what it was intended for, rather than maintain a domain-specific-language that ultimately was just a layer between you and your code that got in the way while debugging.

First, check out the docs also in this repository, and check out all the workflow entries on https://blog.codesherpas.com.

I've been threatening for some time to compile all of this knowledge into a book about modeling workflow for backoffice application in Rails. If you'd like to see something like that, please reach out and convince me to make it happen.

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2014 David Bock

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