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1. Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 04:23:12 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅
   Three years ago we used Apache Airflow to manage workflows with human interaction, i.e. where some stage would be waiting for input, potentially for weeks.
   
   This is not the use case AirFlow is intended for and we quickly ran into limitations on scheduling, concurrency etc, and we yeeted AirFlow and implemented a simple workflow engine with Celery instead.
   
   #AirFlow #ApacheAirFlow
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 04:28:38 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to
     Now it seems that camunda.com/ might be exactly what we should have used.
     
     We were thinking of taking our homegrown and application-specific workflow framework and generalizing it for our other apps that are growing into a need for this kind of thing, but now we'll look into using Camunda before we do that.
     
     It has already been productized internally by global services, so that it ties neatly into some of our other internal services.
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 04:38:01 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to
     #Camunda allows you to create a workflow graph visually and create forms and events for each stage, you can have some branching logic within your workflow, and you can call out to external data sources to retrieve and store data.
     
     I don't have hands-on experience, I just saw a demo of our internal version, but it looks useful and usable enough.
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 04:42:04 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to
     I don't know how much of the below is Camunda and how much is our stuff, but:
     
     There is some effort toward version handling, so that you can redefine your workflow but keep already-running instances of the workflow going without disruption.
     
     You can see a running instance of the workflow with the graph, so that steps are colored to reflect which ones are complete / ongoing / not yet reached.
     
     There's also a task view to see what you personally should be responding to.
   • Björn Lindström (bkhl@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 05:59:00 UTC Björn Lindström

     in reply to

     @clacke I've used Camunda quite a bit, and I'm always sceptical if it's put forward as easier than programming, or as something a non-programmer can use.

     Maybe something like that can be built from it, but I've yet to see it happen.

     I actually still would want to use it, but I think it would require treating it as a UI toolkit, and have the same requirements for putting stuff into the hands of users as if you made a GUI application.

     Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 likes this.
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 06:03:04 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to

     • Björn Lindström
     @bkhl Thanks for the heads-up.
     
     We're not gonna blindly jump into it. I think on the surface it's mostly a way for non-dev engineers to automate some things and for application development I'd like to see a better version control and deployment story.
     
     Maybe we won't end up using the provisioned service so much as the underlying stuff, depending on in how usable a shape it's packaged.
   • Björn Lindström (bkhl@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 06:03:11 UTC Björn Lindström

     in reply to

     @clacke PS. Same applies to other BPMS systems in the same way. For a BPMS, Camunda is a pretty nice one to deal with.

     PPS. Of course a programmer can still make any sort of program in BPMN, but I don't think it's easier to use like that for anyone, than to just use a programming language.

     Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 likes this.
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 06:08:47 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to

     • Björn Lindström
     @bkhl I would love it if there was a toolkit like this that was used as a library rather than a service or framework, and where you could have neatly architected code and then have these nice visual tools for arranging the workflow and also for visualizing the running workflow within the application.
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 06:08:54 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to
     Unfortunately people seldom build software like that, especially when it's an open source startup that needs a chokepoint to extract value, then everything needs to be turned into a central service where the author can offer managed hosting.
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 06:09:03 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to
     Typo corrected before posting: siftware. But maybe that's a good term. =)
   • Björn Lindström (bkhl@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 06:48:20 UTC Björn Lindström

     in reply to

     @clacke yup, it would be neat with something like Racket (but fast), that supported BPMN/DMN files as a "lang".

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   • Björn Lindström (bkhl@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 06:48:28 UTC Björn Lindström

     in reply to

     @clacke maybe this would still be possible in the JVM world, if you made a compiler from BPMN/DMN into a Java bytecode program?

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   • Björn Lindström (bkhl@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 10-Feb-2022 16:39:59 UTC Björn Lindström

     in reply to

     @clacke another thing I feel is missing in the exiting UI for e.g. Camunda is testing.

     I'd like to be able to put in some variables, click "run", and see a visualization of what happens, without having to first deploy and trigger a process somehow. Ideally it should automatically ask for all the external preconditions, rather than call anything external.

     This would also require that when you create plugins with new tasks types, you'd effectively also need to implement mocks for them.

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