This page describes shortly what a workflow is in CVW.
To ease the understanding here is a sketch that plots the elements of a workflow and their relations: (explanation follows)
A workflow has several steps and actions can be performed to transition a workflow from one step to another. Later you may see that a workflow can be in more than one step at a time, but for now we neglect this complexity. (See more_than_one_step.html for more details.)
When a workflow is in a Step there can be several actions to be executed to transport the workflow from the step to another. The available actions are defined in the workflow definition. The application using the CVW library may decide which action to perform. The usual implementation displays the available actions to the user and the user can select what to do next.
When the user (or any other external entity) selects an action the action is executed and produces a Result. Based on the Result the workflow will transfer from the original step to a new one.
CVW does not execute workflow. No threads are started, no states are stored. It is up to the embedding application to call methods from the API to build up workflow definition (there is some default implementation that reads XML and returns WorkflowDefinition), instantiate workflow, advance the workflow from step to step.
In one minute this is a workflow in CVW. There are some more details, like conditions, validators, pre and post functions in actions, definitions of steps, results, actions and workflow but those do not fit into the one minute version of workflow page. For these details go on reading workflow in 5 minutes.
To see some sample code to use CVW see sample.java.html. But before that you better read the five minutes intro.