A little while ago, there was some back-and-forth in the forums about why workflow is in a BPM/Workflow forum rather than its own forum here at SDN. From what Mairlyn and Alan and others said in that discussion, I came to understand the functional reasons for this placement of workflow in the forums. But having just completed BIT601 and looking foward to 610, I can also understand the technical reasons for this placement. OK - if you were at Tech Ed 2006 in Las Vegas or elsewhere, you probably heard a great presentation about the MVC (Model-View-Controller) construct in WDA/WDJ and how it relates to the standard Javaesque view of the world. (I think this presentation was by Karl Kessler - if not, I apologize to whoever's it actually was.) In any event, I was so inspired by this talk that I came back to Nashville determined to at least learn how MVC is implemented in WDA in detail. And as you all are aware, PAINFULLY aware, I managed to learn quite a bit about the MVC constuct in WDA by trying to do an "event-driven self-tutorial" on modifying the WDA component WDY_TEST_UI_ELEMENTS and blogging about this effort here. Well, sometime in the middle of BIT601 this week, Dereck (Purnell) happened to point us to the SWC* function modules that support operations on various types of workflow containers ... gets, sets, etc. And once I saw those, it immediately got me thinking about the bindings that are done in workflow among containers and workflows, tasks, steps, rules, etc. And all of a sudden - the light-bulb went off in my head. (You have to realize that I'm a bear-of-very-little-brain like Winnie-the-Pooh, and not a wunderkind techie like some here.) Yes folks - you heard it here first (ha-ha!!) - containers in workflows are "kissing cousins" of controllers in the WDA/WDJ MVC construct, workflows are "kissing cousins" of models, and step-types are "kissing cousins" of UI Elements. Now for some folks here - a lot of folks probably - this is old old news. But for me it was like a revelation, particularly because the MVC construct deals with events tied to an essentially spatial frame (the screen) whereas workflows deal with events tied to an essentially temporal frame. And the similarity of temporal workflow to spatial MVC appealed to me because if our current view of the universe is correct so far as it goes, then there should be all kinds of logical operations that do just as well in space as in time. But anyway, I really think that if an ABAPer has never done workflow nor WDA/WDJ, it would be very worth his or her time to take BIT600/01/10 for no other reason than as a technical "intro" to WDA/WDJ, VC/CAF, and NWDS. It's always best to go from what you know to what you don't yet know, and workflow provides exactly the right path from ABAP OO to WDA/WDJ, NWDS, and VC/CAF.
