I am currently building a project using Struts, Spring and Hibernate with OSWorkflow. The current development build (2.8) has built-in support for a Spring / Hibernate environment. In this case, performing an action in the workflow can check against a set of pre-conditions, which can refer to logic in the business layer and can then call some functions if the conditions hold, which can also refer to business logic. This is nice because Spring deals with the dependencies for the conditions and functions. The end result is my business logic is protected by the workflow engine, which prevents any action being performed in the wrong stage of the process.

The only downside of OSWorkflow is that you have to call the workflow action by passing the action's id (an int) and a map of all the inputs to the engine. I'm getting around this by writing an abstraction layer that provides nice method signatures (the business facade) for my struts actions (or any other client). These methods will map to an action id, take all the arguments from the signature and wrap them in a map and call the action.

I hope this is helpful.

Adam

PS: Does anyone know if there is a workflow abstraction API under development somewhere?