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The Imixs Workflow Engine can be used to build business applications in a fast and flexible way. The project provides a persistence API to store business data and a workflow service component to create and process workitems based on a workflow model.

The following section helps you to decide how you can use and work with these components in different scenarios in the software development process.

Using the Imixs Workflow Engine out of the Box

Using the Imixs Workflow out of the Box is a good starting point to run the workflow engine without modification or Java EE development.

See the installation guide for informations how to install the Imixs Sample Application. After the installation you can access the sample application through your web browser. The Imixs Sample Application shows how Imixs Workflow works and you can see what happens if you change the business model of the application or adding new workflows. If you check out the sample application from the source code repository you will see more details and you can take the Imixs Sample Application as a source code template.

Using Imixs Workflow in a Java EE Project

Using the Imixs Workflow Engine in a Java EE project is the typical way for developers building a business application. In this kind of usage you develop your own Java EE project. Inside your application you integrate the Imixs Workflow Engine to provide the typical functionality of a Workflow Management System. See the Examples section for further informations.

As the Imixs Workflow Engine is build up on the Java EE specification it consists of a set of standard Java EE components like EJBs and JPA components. The Imixs Workflow deployment section describes how to deploy the Imixs Workflow engine int an enterprise application (EAR) in more detail.

Using Imixs Workflow to implement new modules

You can also use the results of the Imixs Workflow project to implement your own workflow engine. In this case you extend the implementation with additional features or just add a different behavior.

So in different of the usage described before, you need more than a running instance of the Workflow Engine or the Java EE libraries. In this kind of usage you should check out the source code packages from the Source Code repository and set up a Java EE Project like the Imixs Java EE Sample Application. You can test the different parts of the implementation and extend the existing components. The source code include also some JUnit tests which can help you to test different behaviors of the engine in more detail.

See the Imixs Workflow community site for details and coding concepts. Also take a look in the Forum to discuss features, requests or bugs.