Ciaran, this sounds like a good approach. Before the chat it would be helpful if you could provide a demo of what you achieved with the petri based workflows. I can talk a little bit about what we did with the current workflow package and hopefully Frank and others can chip in with their ideas (e.g Jarkko with his knowledge of Simulation).
Once we have a broader understanding what the various needs are and where we are using the various technologies, hopefully we could end up with a work plan on how to integrate all these ideas into a core workflow system that supports both approaches along with guidelines on how to upgrade your existing packages to make use of this new workflow package.
This will also have the additional benefit that we will get a good description of the OpenACS Workflow capabiltities.
As Frank mentioned dynfields, are there any plans to commit this to the toolkit (I know we wanted to do it but at the time when I looked at it I did not have the courage to go through the code and check it out utterly as it proved to be a bigger hassle to integrate with Contacts instead of AMS than Frank first let on). Furthermore, as he is most knowledgable, he should commit this and maintain it out of the OpenACS tree (taking into account that this is GPL, something I'm not always sure of when dealing with P/O, i get confused from time to time).
