I am curious about the Ajax handling. It isn't very easy to determine what is actually going on with it. Any insight?

Just to be upfront, I've downloaded 2.0M4 but haven't gotten to kick the tires yet. That being said, I'm currently developing a new checkout process for a large e-commerce retailer using Web Flow 1.0. We're making extensive use of sub-flows to accept various payment methods, and manage wallets, etc. Web flow really makes this whole process a lot more pleasurable!

One thing that I would like to be able to accomplish with Web Flow is to have standard way invalidate a form in a target state after an on-exception transition occurs. For instance, if you have a view state that takes payment information (and the form passes normal validation) but on the submit order step the payment authorization fails, we need to transition back to the payment view and invalidate the form.

To solve this problem, I had to create a non standard solution (which you can see here: code.google.com/p/martinimix/source/browse/trunk/martinimix/src/java/net/martinimix/webflow/action/AbstractExceptionAwareFormAction.java)

Also, if the payment form is in a sub-flow, there is no simple way to re-enter the sub-flow and pass in the exception triggering the transition.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see a way to handle these two scenarios and it would be nice to have a standard solution.

Just to be upfront, I've downloaded 2.0M4 but haven't gotten to kick the tires yet. That being said, I'm currently developing a the checkout process for a large e-commerce retailer using Web Flow 1.0. We're making extensive use of sub-flows to accept various payment methods, and manage wallets, etc. Web flow really makes this whole process a lot more pleasurable.

One thing that I would like to be able to accomplish with Web Flow is to have standard way invalidate a form in a target state after an on-exception transition occurs. For instance, if you have a view state that takes payment information (and the form passes normal validation) but on the submit order step the payment authorization fails, we need to transition back to the payment view and invalidate the form.

To solve this problem, I had to create a non-standard solution (which you can see here: http://code.google.com/p/martinimix/source/browse/trunk/martinimix/src/java/net/martinimix/webflow/action/AbstractExceptionAwareFormAction.java)

Also, if the payment form is in a sub-flow, there is no simple way to re-enter the sub-flow and pass in the exception triggering the transition.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see a way to handle these two scenarios and it would be nice to have a standard solution.

Yes, many of these new features work on Java 1.4. Only a few require Java 5. Web Flow, in general, supports Java 1.4 or >. Spring Faces requires JSF 1.2 in places, which requires java 5, but all of your Web Flow language features run on Java 1.4. We will be spelling all this out in the reference guide in the next release.

Serge,

You can expect a Shiny new reference guide to ship with Web Flow 2. M4 introduces the first part of it. Also, I can't speak for Erwin, but I imagine he has plans to update his Working With Spring Web Flow book to version 2.

Xavier,

Switching conversations using some interface would be a nice feature. Currently, this is not supported, but we have considered this. We will make sure, at a minimum, the necessary hooks are there in 2.0 GA for doing this.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Keep it coming!

Since I recently joined a project that uses webflow 1.x, I was wondering if there was a way (be it in 1.x or 2.0) to list active flows for a user? If no, should the ConversationManager provide the list through a method like getActiveConversations() or should a FlowExecutionListener gather the Conversations and manage the list? A list of active conversations ( some metadata for display) would allow users to easily switch from a flow to an other without opening more browsers/tabs.