What Is Workflow?

The Web is full of definitions and examples of what one person or group thinks workflow is. Some define workflow as "the automation of the back office." Others use the phrase, "business processing modeling," and charge a lot of money for consulting fees explaining it to you. For the purposes of this chapter, we use the following definition of workflow:

A workflow is a set of interdependent tasks that occur in a specific sequence.

As we get further into the chapter, this definition will become clearer.

What Does Workflow Have to Do with Quartz?

If you're asking, "What does workflow have to work Quartz?" the answer is, "Quite a bit." Even for simple tasks such as performing automated builds or just sending e-mails, workflow has a place. Quartz supports some basic approaches to chaining jobs together. This chapter discusses those and shows how to integrate Quartz with a popular open source workflow solution.