Designing a workflow algorithm

[hackerlabs]

I don't know if that's the right thing to call it, but yeah  :toothy

Okay, so my job involves workflows a lot.
It's different, here at IBM - workflow's more about how to ensure that our delivery centers are always operational.
But software workflows interest me too. And I like PowerWF a lot - it allows me to get the best of PowerShell and WOrkflow Foundation.

I've been thinking about this for quite some time. Obviously, designing a workflow using Workflow Foundation and/or PowerShell has speed limitations. But I'm sure you'd agree - writing code faster code is easy in assembly.
And with MASM having all sorts of procedures and so on, you can write what is theoretically called "high-level" code.
So how about writing workflows in Assembly?

I believe the first thing, is to define a workflow. I guess (and according to Wikipedia  :8) ) :

A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated in workshare, work split or other types of ordering. For control purposes, workflow may be a view on real work under a chosen aspect, thus serving as a virtual representation of actual work. The flow being described often refers to a document that is being transferred from one step to another.

A workflow is a model to represent real work for further assessment, e.g., for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. More abstractly, a workflow is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing.

Workflow concepts are closely related to other concepts used to describe organizational structure, such as silos, functions, teams, projects, policies and hierarchies. Workflows may be viewed as one primitive building block of organizations. The relationships among these concepts are described later in this entry.

The term workflow is used in computer programming to capture and develop human-to-machine interaction.

What do you guys say?


I know for one, that it would make interacting with the Windows API a whole lot simpler - I'm just not sure if it's going to be as simple to access datastores and so on. I know it's possible, but is it easy?

Next, we have interacting with web services. With PowerWF, it's easy. All I do is generate a definition file in C# from the web service using a tool supplied with the Microsoft .NET SDK, and then I link it up with my code and it works. But what happens with assembly, more specifically, MASM?

[vanjast]

What you're looking for is 'Structured Programming Models'.
This doesn't exist with Masm (assembler) so it's not possible to create workflows with 'unwanted penalties' which are unacceptable at the Masm level.
:bg