An XML and Component-based IDE for Document Flow Application

Business process in e-government mostly embody as the flow of documents. Constructing a web-based document flow system becomes an critical task for today s digital government. But few of them use an off-the-shelf workflow product. Why? One of the reasons is that most of the workflow system are heavyweight, monolithic, and package a comprehensive set of features in an all-or-nothing manner. Another reason is that workflow technology lacks the constructs and modeling capability as programming language. It is incumbent on government IT organizations to transform their solution development to component-based computing model. Component technology isolates the computation and communication parts, but how to compose different software components is still a hard nut. An integrated development environment is necessary for CBSD. In this paper we propose a XML and component-based document flow-oriented integrated development environment (DFoIDE) for software developers. By writing some xml configure file, and operate on DFoIDE, developer can construct a workflow application quickly. This method divides system to several components and the activities in process are implemented as business component. Different components are discribed detailedly in this paper, especially one of the core component. Component Integrating Tool. Different perspectives in workflow application are seperated and depicted as different XML files. Correspondly, A component composition method for developing workflow application instead of workflow itself is proposed.