Workflow, part 3

I presented OOP approach for solving workflow tasks in my previous post. Now I'd like to show you, how to deal with workflows in a slight different manner. I'm gonna write about Workflow lbrary from CPAN. And I'm going to present you some kind of a tutorial on how to use this lib, and what features does it have.
The main idea of Workflow lib is configuration over coding. Flow is described in XML files, of course 'some' coding is still required.
So let's implement our request management using workflow lib. First of all, we'll create application, with all that simplifications, that we had in previous post, and than enhance it to real world web application and add some complex and interesting features that workflow lib can offer.

Workflow and Perl, part 2

Let's make some code. (Check my previous post for flow chart).

Let's use quite simple straightforward approach, and then modify it with some design patterns.

General idea: We will have simple request object. (We wouldn't care how it's populated with data, let's assume that we have some collection object, that gathers requests from database and creates objects). Request will have following properties: id, description, state. We must be able to change states and perform some actions during that state changes.

I'm using v5.10 & Mouse.

Workflow and Perl, part 1

I'd like to start series of posts related to workflow, workflow management systems and of course Perl. Workflows seems to be quite “hot” topic in all that world of enterprise software for the last ~5 years.

First, let's figure out what workflow is, why we should care and how Perl can deal with it.

What is workflow?
Sample Workflow

A workflow is just a bunch of …