The work on patterns-based evaluation of three major open source workflow management systems was finalized in December 2007. The evaluated systems are:
All three systems are written in Java. Paul Harmon outlines them, in his article from 31st of July 2007, as the most often mentioned systems he has come across. We selected them for our evaluation because they are regularly updated and their web sites provide an indication of an active and sizeable user community. jBPM is part of JBoss (a commercial company), Enhydra Shark supports XPDL (the standard proposed by the WfMC) and OpenWFE is an active project on Sourceforge, labelled as “Production/Stable”, and having more than 100,000 downloads.
The workflow patterns were used as evaluation framework.
The work was conducted in cooperation with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The results are presented in a technical report (draft version) which is co-authored by myself, Birger Andersson (from Syslab, SU/KTH), Arthur ter Hofstede (QUT), Nick Russell (TUE), and Wil van der Aalst (TUE). The report was sent for review to the developers of the three systems. It is also published on the BPM Center and on the workflow patterns web sites.
Due to some of the authors’ close involvement, the YAWL system was not considered in this evaluation.