Birgit Lewicki

Greenhorn
+ Follow
since Jan 18, 2006
Merit badge: grant badges
For More
Cows and Likes
Cows
Total received
0
In last 30 days
0
Total given
0
Likes
Total received
0
Received in last 30 days
0
Total given
0
Given in last 30 days
0
Forums and Threads
Scavenger Hunt
expand Ranch Hand Scavenger Hunt
expand Greenhorn Scavenger Hunt

Recent posts by Birgit Lewicki

thanks a lot for your suggestions. They give me really a good starting point for my work.

Birgit
Hi Stan,

thank you very much for your reply.

It seems that my question was to general, sorry for that.
The whole system will be a web-based application using Struts and Hibernate. There are components for data loading, perisisting the data, viewing the data and something like a workflow component that should be as independent as possible from the other components (thanks for pointing me to the enterprise level patterns).

This is my first approach to apply the GoF patterns and the idea is to look initially to this workflow component. One of several problems here is that this component has to execute different software tools in a variable order. The nature of these tools is considerably variable. Either they are command line tools (written in Perl, C++, C or something else), or it could be a database that has to be queried. In the future new tools will appear whose nature is not yet known, but it should be also possible to integrate them into the system. Therefore it is necessary to mask this variable nature somehow to the system. Is it possible to use for such problem the adapter or the facade?

Until now I tried to find my way through the pattern jungle with the GoF book. But honestly I feel a little bit lost with that, specially when I want to decide which pattern to apply at which level in my system. Just recently I discovered the Head First design pattern book which looks at the first glance really great to me and seems to be the perfect approach to give me the needed understanding. But I've just started to go through.
At the same time I wanted already to gather some ideas for my system with the hope to work more goal-oriented on that field.

With best regards,
Birgit
Hi all,

I'm new to design patterns and therefore I'm not sure which is the best pattern to use for my implementation task.

We are going to develop a workflow system that consists of data and different software tools that process these data. Each tool takes as input some data usually in a certain file format or a kind of list, processes these data and produces as output some result data in another (file) format. The user has to define at the beginning of the workflow process several parameters:

These are
- the input data set for the first tool
- which tools should run during the whole process
- the order of the tools
- some tool specific parameters

During the whole process the output data one tool produces are the input data the next tool is using, therefore during each step the output data have to be reformatted in order that they fit to the input format for the next tool. All intermediate result data are stored to a database in order to check and understand later what has happened during the run and to be able to reuse them again for other workflow runs with different orders of tools and different parameters. It should be possible later to add new tools to the whole system.

Which design pattern(s) can be used for that?

Many thanks in advance to all for any kind of help, suggestions and replies.

Best regards,
Birgit Lewicki