History

WIP objects—in previous incarnations called FormSets, DocSets, E-Docs, and Proposals—made their debut in 1991, in presentations by John Tibbetts at IBM and Smalltalk conferences.

The 1992 book Building Cooperative Processing Applications Using SAA (John Wiley), by Tibbetts and Barbara Bernstein, laid out the basic insights now embodied in the WorkThru framework. Tibbetts and Bernstein wrote widely about intelligent middle tier objects and collaborative transactions in their InformationWeek column between 1994 and 1999, and in articles in Object magazine and Distributed Computing.

While heading the consulting company Kinexis, John Tibbetts built the WorkThru prototype, then called Proposal-based Architecture. He received a patent for PBA in 1999. This patent is included in the open-source WorkThru offering.

In 1999 the Kinexis principals joined with others to found ePropose, a company devoted to building-out the PBA architecture and applying it to the then-hot area of online marketplaces. The technology was used for a number of applications, including a major financial-services marketplace that is still operating.

In 2004, back at Kinexis, John Tibbetts began a complete rewrite that focused on optimizing a small set of collaboration-oriented objects, components, and patterns using open-souce components. After two years of work, the overarching PBA architecture has given way to the much smaller, easily-maintainable, easily-incorporated WorkThru framework, which is offered under an open-source license.

A small number of developers have been using WorkThru concepts and components in the past year. The framework is now available to all. We invite you to try the WorkThru approach and join the informal team that is improving and extending it.