Lars, I love the sound of a new workflow package. I had one project where I was planning to use the old wf package, and I had a sigh of relief when it was canned, because it scared me! (But maybe I'm just soft... or maybe I never actually investigated it enough)
While browsing a recent Linux Journel I noticed an article on JStateMachine which is an interesting Java class which basically builds a Java app using a FSM to define the processes.
They use an XML definition format, and they have a description and worked example of how to systematically convert a state chart into XML:
http://www.jstatemachine.org/EncodeAChart.EncodeAChart.jsm
http://www.jstatemachine.org/EncodeAChart.Example.jsm
The also have a (well commented) formal DTD defining the format:
http://www.jstatemachine.org/statechart.dtd
Note that as a great example of why java web servers arent quite there yet I had to force reload the pages a few times each to get the whole content ;)
The XML source is a whole lot uglier, but in a decent XML editor it will look not dissimiler to the ad_page_contract style you suggest.
Also, holding the definition in a separate XML file means that you could easily add simple web-based editing.
For the record, I would be interested in this wf package to run the escalation processes of a network monitoring package I am writing, so I would be happy to be involved in testing or outsourcing a chunk of feature coding.
