Developer Overview

This section contains a brief overview of how CloudSlang and the CloudSlang Orchestration Engine (Score) work. For more detailed information see the Score API and Slang API sections.

The CloudSlang Orchestration Engine is an engine that runs workflows. Internally, the workflows are represented as ExecutionPlans. An ExecutionPlan is essentially a map of IDs and ExecutionSteps. Each ExecutionStep contains information for calling an action method and a navigation method.

When an ExecutionPlan is triggered it executes the first ExecutionStep’s action method and navigation method. The navigation method returns the ID of the next ExecutionStep to run. Execution continues in this manner, successively calling the next ExecutionStep’s action and navigation methods, until a navigation method returns null to indicate the end of the flow.

CloudSlang plugs into the CloudSlang Orchestration Engine (Score) by compiling its workflow and operation files into Score ExecutionPlans and then triggering them. Generally, when working with CloudSlang content, all interaction with Score goes through the Slang API, not the Score API.