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Title

Planning complex software processes

Description

I've recently written a new startup system for my company's main software library. The technology on which it's based is documented in the white paper, <a href="http://www.earthli.com/users/marco/docs/opus/2003_04_message_logging.html" title="Describing Multi-step Processes: A new approach to Atlas 2 initialization">Describing Multi-step Processes</a>. The abstract is below: <bq>Discusses the properties and requirements of multi-stage tasks or processes. Addresses the challenges associated with maintaining and customizing complex hierarchies of tasks by using a declarative approach which concerns itself less with the absolute ordering of steps within a task and more with explicitly specifying the implicit requirements or preconditions for each step. This more free-form approach to building a process allows fine-grained querying of the success or failure of individual steps or groups of steps. It also requires a developer to specify only as much about the process as its complexity demands, with as little scaffolding as possible, which vastly increases scalability. Includes a simple and powerful task- and language-independent API.</bq>