Features and Benefits

Workflow

Model Workflows Visually

Create workflows using an intuitive graphical user interface through your Web browser.

Monitor Workflows

Use the Flux Web user interface to monitor running workflows. While monitoring workflows through this Web-based Operation Console, you can also interact with your workflows. Workflows can be paused, started, recovered when they fail, removed, expedited, and rescheduled all through the intuitive Web-based Operations Console. For completeness, you can also control your workflows using the Flux command line interface.

Model Workflows Using 40+ Activities

Flux provides 40+ built-in activities for modeling sophisticated workflows. You can also extend any of those activities to make your own custom action. Using the Flux API, you can design your own workflow activity and plug it into Flux.

Schedule Java Software Processes, POJOs, EJBs, JMS Messages, Software Processes, Scripts, and Other Software

Once you have defined your workflow, define what software processes need to be called. You can call any software program or script as part of your workflow. Call any kind of Java software - Java classes, POJOs (Plain old Java objects), RMI servers and objects, EJB session beans, and EJB entity beans. You can also publish JMS messages.

Integrate Your Workflows with Email, Files, and Other External Systems

Flux workflows can process files. For example, a Flux workflow may monitor FTP, FTPS (FTP/SSL), SFTP (SSH FTP), and UNC (Universal Naming Convention), and local servers, awaiting the arrival of important files. Once those files arrive, the workflow can process them and send out new files to other servers.

Flux workflows can receive and send email. For example, a Flux workflow may lie dormant until an email arrives, signaling the beginning of work. As part of the workflow, Flux can send emails and instant messages.

Splits and Joins

Define workflows that split into parallel work paths. Later, join these multiple paths back into a single path. Splits and joins allow you to define workflows that can watch for more than one change at a time in your environment. For example, using a split and join, you can wait for a file to arrive on your FTP server, and you can wait for a message to arrive, both at the same time and within a single workflow. Splits and joins also allow you to execute different workflow tasks in parallel.

Conditional Joins

Conditional joins allow you to create workflows with parallel work paths that collapse those work paths only under certain conditions. For example, if you need to receive files from both your east coast and west coast offices, you can create such a workflow using a conditional Join.

Conditional Workflow Branching

Create workflows that contain sophisticated branch conditions within each workflow. For example, if your workflow must process different kinds of files, you can create a workflow that follows a different path in the workflow depending on the content of each file to be processed.

Sub-Workflows

You can define workflows within workflows. These sub-workflows make a complex workflow easier to understand and allow a workflow to be re-used within other workflows repeatedly.

Signals

Signals are mechanisms used to notify workflow tasks of important events within a single workflow. Using signals, you can create intricate dependencies among the various tasks in a workflow. Signals are passed strictly within a single workflow. To pass messages between different workflows, use Flux Messages (described below).

Messages

Messages are like signals, except they are passed between different jobs and workflows running in a Flux engine or across a cluster of Flux engines. Like signals, messages are used to create dependencies among different workflows and can contain data.