Freefluo is a workflow orchestration tool for web services initially developed by IT Innovation but now available to all from the Freefluo Sourceforge Site. It can handle WSDL based web service invocation. It supports two XML workflow languages, one based on IBM's WSFL and another named XScufl that is under development as part of the Taverna Sourceforge project.
Freefluo is very flexible, at its core is a reusable orchestration framework that is not tied to any workflow language or execution architecture. Freefluo includes extension libraries that enable execution of workflows written in a subset of WSFL. Support exists for for discovery via standard UDDI and recording of provenance.
Freefluo is one component within the myGrid toolkit. The myGrid toolkit is composed of numerous useful software components. These components are designed to demonstrate higher level functionalities over an existing Grid infrastructure that support scientists in making use of complex distributed resources. These higher level functionalities extend through service lookup and discovery, provenance and data storage.
More information is available at myGrid.
IT Innovation is collaborating with other members of myGrid, particularly the EBI, to define a new simplified workflow language and accompanying tools. This effort has created a workflow language called Scufl (Simple Conceptual Unified Flow Language) and an XML representation called XScufl. In addition a reference workflow authoring workbench has been developed. Development is taking place as a Sourceforge project called Taverna. The workbench enables editing of scufl workflows, translation to a visual representation that is browsable and also execution of those workflows using a predecessor to Freefluo called the myGrid Workflow Enactment Engine. The following image shows the workbench in action running a workflow. Freefluo will be fully integrated into Taverna soon.