[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Workflow-0.5.8.0

[Alberto G. Corona]

This is A new version of the package workflow.   I probably will
change the name of this package since it is  too generic.

A workflow can be seen as a persistent thread that executes a monadic
computation. Therefore, it can be used in very time consuming
computations such are CPU intensive calculations with intermediate
results or with  procedures that are most of the time waiting for the
response of a process or an user, that are prone to comunication
failures, timeouts or shutdowns.

Workflow has a   operation, called "step" that lift the monadic
computation to the Workflow monad. This bring services of transparent
state loogging, so that the computation can be restarted at the point
of stop/failure.  Additionally , the package has persistent queues,
persistent data collections, and persistent timeouts (whit which the
workflow can wait for days, months or even years, more than the
average time between failures). This is important for programming
office workflow or in election processes where the user has a limited
time to decide/vote.

This version has many improvements: it admits Data.Binary
serialization for logging (besides RefSerialize of previous versions).
. It also has  an EDSL of high level monadic combinators that
represent workflow patterns. For example, split, merge,
synchronization, votation etc.

There are examples in the online documentation and some demos in the package.

My motivation for developping Workflow is to use it in a project for
electronic democracy in the Web. If anyone is interested in the
package Workflow and/or electronic democracy, I will be happy to talk
with him.

Hope to be useful

Alberto.