5 Conclusion and further work

Component-based systems allow the creation of new wfms-architectures using composite applications, which enables the distributed processing of workflows in heterogeneous environments. Furthermore there are astonishing analogies between the construction of component-based systems and the creation of workflow-applications with wfms. Both cover the composition of application functionality from pre-fabricated components, whose implementation details are not know. The creation of an wfms-architecture and the transformation of business process into this architecture can be thought of as part of a domain-specific development methodology for component-based systems as proposed in [JB96].

Further work will include a more detailed description of workflow processing. Especially the event mechanism will be described in more detail and with special attention to the handling of temporal conditions and complex data structures. To create a workflow-specific development methodology the transformation of business-process models, like those of the SOM-approach [FS94] will be a major point of work.