See my patterns for Transactions and Accounts and the work that Hiroaki Nakamura is doing on a framework based on the REA model . Earlier, we built a framework called Accounts . A key to both of these systems is representing business rules as objects that can be stored in a database and changed without changing any code. In the summer of 1997 I ran a workshop on business transactions. Although a lot of work has been done on workflow system, most of it does not seem to have been designed for object-oriented systems.
Many business systems are primarily information models, and the information changes rapidly.
The systems primarily manage the information, and most of the code is interfacing with the GUI or the database. I've seen several systems like this based on a Dynamic Object-Model , and have been studying and using these techniques. In fact, both our workflow framework and the REA-based framework are examples. Joe Yoder is keeping information on this topic, and has helped run some workshops on it.