RESTful Job Control
A recipe for supporting general workflow management for independent service interfaces
NOTE: See RESTful Job Control for details on the design, documentation, and diagram of the RESTful Job Control pattern.
This profile provides a basic set of actions and metadata for orchestrating independent services on the open web.
Each job contains one or more tasks. The set of tasks in each job MUST be able to run in parallel. Each task SHOULD be repeatable and reversible. Each job SHOULD be restartable and reentrant.
To run a job, the job document should be submitted to a workflow engine. Upon recieving the document the workflow engine MUST return a 202 Accepted while the tasks are processed and SHOULD eventually return a 200 OK or a 4xx/5xx HTTP status with the completed response. Upon completion of a job, that job document MAY be archived for future reference (or re-execution) and the appropriate link (jobSuccessURL or jobFailedURL) SHOULD be activated.
Compliant Workflow engines MUST be prepared to handle the taskURL, taskRollbackURL, and taskRerunURL properties as well as monitor/update progress via taskStatus and jobStatus. The engines SHOULD also monitor the jobMaxTTL and taskMaxTTL values and cancel jobs where the maximum run time has been exceeded.
Tasks that need to be run in a fixed sequence MUST be separated into individual job documents and those job documents can be run in fixed order as each job successfully completes.
NOTE: Workflow authoring services MAY be separate from workflow execution services. The editor and the engine don't need to be hosted within the same service interface.