Development time 8 months

The Cockpit is a framework for the development of workflow based applications for the Internet/Intranet, e.g. Staffware. HTC has developed and helped clients develop several different interfaces to the Staffware workflow engine.

Development of workflow systems was encumbered by time-consuming implementation of common application components. Such as basic user interface, authentication and security access component, application administration tools, reporting tools for workflow operations progress, and statistic information on the system and users. This framework was created with the purpose to simplify development of applications, based on the Staffware workflow.

This framework is designated for development of applications with n-tier architecture, and permits standard implementation of components necessary for any application: application administration, application component administration, traditional workflow capabilities, advanced reporting and statistics. The developer is provided with a set of base classes for GUI development, implementation of business objects, as well as for their interaction with the application server and workflow-processor. The part for the client side can be fulfilled as an applet or standalone Java application. The server part includes:

• staffware workflow engine, responsible for business procedures and business workflow logic
• database server that provides storage of the application data
• application server which supports the J2EE specification and hosts components that execute the business logic of the application

The specific business logic components of an application can be attached to the framework in a standard pattern. Because of its design, the Cockpit doesn't require any code changes to integrate the business logic components. Configuration information for the application components is stored in text files in XML format and can be easily modified.

Any application server that supports J2EE technology can be used for Cockpit Framework.

The Cockpit Framework need the following minimal support from the server: Servlet API 2.2, JSP 1.1, EJB 1.1 specifications. Any database server supplied with JDBC drivers can be used as its database server. Also, any web browser with Java-support or a standalone Java application can serve as the client.

Cockpit Framework was used to develop the Disputes Automated Tracking (DAT) application.