Whats the best tool to build a visual workflow manager [closed]

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Wondering if anyone had any ideas on the best tool to build a visual workflow manager. Envisioning a bunch of 'blocks' that can be dropped and then connected together in order to build workflow, IE:

Send email -> wait 4 days -> if email answered send this email > if not log to db

each action would be a block with properties associated with it. The user would be able to drag the blocks 开发者_Go百科around and connect them.

I want to keep it uber simple. Cross modern browser compat is important but we can ask that clients install software if necessary (silverlight).

Some ideas that pop into mind jQuery silverlight SproutCore

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jQuery-ui may be able to do what you want depending on complexity of your blocking. Look into draggable and sortable objects.

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The Ajax.org framework might be exactly what you need, I used it before for a similar project, building a workflow manager for bioinformatic experiments. There already is a flowchart component which can be expanded.

The main challenges our team faced when working with the Ajax.org framework were poor documentation (at least at the time), and some parts of the framework we wanted to use such as the property editor (which is exactly what we wanted, we wanted a bunch of attribute/value combinations for each node in the graph) simply didn't work so we had to make our own anyway.

In summary:

Pros: Looks nice, probably the closest thing I've seen to what you want.

Cons: Small community, relatively poor documentation and examples creates a steep learning curve. The whole framework is pretty very large and bulky, you write the program in an XML file (or JS) that gets interpreted by the framework.

Originally I had started doing the front end from scratch then we moved to Ajax.org, If I had to do it again I would probably build it on something like Raphael. Drawing in SVG would probably be a lot easier than hacking together divs to make connections.

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We are leaning towards sproutcore