Skelta

Skelta, the name somehow reminds me of Zelda games. But Skelta is not a game, nor anything related to it. It a tool, a work flow tool. It's web site screams about itself as The World's 1st embedable .net BPM and work flow engine using Microsoft .net framework..
Now what am i doing talking abt some microsoft technology... well i was forced to sit through the demo of skelta. which i should say was quiet interesting product, considering, i too work with a tool, which is similar to this in the work flow design market, but that is of JAVA technology. ok, coming to Skelta, it had a nice good looking UI, and also the demo was impressive, and the Skelta guys have promised to give us a eval version which we can use it and see.

First things though i was impressed with skelta, i couldn't stop noting the one requirement which Skelta had. which was not so nice. It requires Either Mssql 2005 or above or Oracle 10g and above for it to run, and the other applicatios which are there already may run on any database which it has. now why should i go to installl another database server just for skelta when i am already using something which is being used by numerous other applications. I don't know why they stuck with only these tow databases for skelta's internal db use. This is one place where the tool i work with has a advantange, it can connect to any database with a JDBC driver, which is nearly every other database that exists, which is nearly everything. (ok there might be exceptions but then, Skelta too could not connect there either).

Though it has a nearly good looking ui, it looks too much like my Mail client's inbox, which looks boring after some time. This is again where there is a hands up with the my tool. But clearly there are places where D*******N will skore against Skelta, but there are, again places where Skelta will score. Now which i will be using in the near future, that i cannot tell, if my bosses say use Skelta, then i will have to use it. But then that doesn;t mean i will put my D*******N skillls to rest. I'll put them to good use somewhere...........

Like the same challenge that i had with this one porting to linux, this time i might have a greater challenge, coz this one will not work in Linux, as this is a microsoft technology. But again there is always a alternative when comming to linux, and there is MONO in this case. I might be tempted to try to port it to MONO but i won;t have the kind of support that i had for the present tool. Coz i won;t have access to the code base. But still there is no harm in trying. Lets wait with crossed fingers, for what the future holds only future knows..............