nflow

nFlow

nFlow is a battle-proven solution for orchestrating business processes. Depending on where you're coming from, you can view nFlow as any of the following:

Microservices orchestrator (as in Saga-pattern)
Guaranteed delivery computing
Replacement for business process engine
Persistent finite-state machine

nFlow has been under development since 2014-01-14 and version 1.0.0 was released on 2014-09-13.

Key Features

Non-declarative — workflows are defined as code
Visualization — workflows can be visualized in nFlow Explorer
Embeddable — usually embedded as a library, but a standalone server is also provided
High availability — the same workflows can be processed by multiple deployments
Fault tolerant — automatic recovery if runtime environment crashes
Atomic state updates — uses and requires a relational database for atomic state updates and locking
Multiple databases supported — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, H2
Open Source under EUPL

<a name="getting-started"><a name="one-minute-guide"></a></a>1 Minute Guide for Getting Started

Create a Maven project. Add the following to your pom.xml. nFlow is available in the Maven Central Repository.

<dependency>
  <groupId>io.nflow</groupId>
  <artifactId>nflow-jetty</artifactId>
  <version>9.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Create a class for starting nFlow in embedded Jetty using H2 memory database.

import io.nflow.jetty.StartNflow;

public class App {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    new StartNflow().startJetty(7500, "local", "");
  }
}

That's it! Running App in your favourite IDE will start nFlow server though without any workflow definitions.

Point your browser to http://localhost:7500/nflow/ui/doc/ and you can use interactive online documentation for the nFlow REST API.

Point your browser to http://localhost:7500/nflow/ui/explorer/ and you can use nFlow Explorer.

See Getting started section for instruction on creating your own workflow definitions.

<a name="components"></a>Ok, I'm interested

For a more thorough getting started guide, configurations, license information etc. checkout the nFlow wiki pages! You can also look into a short slide deck.

Discussion and questions are welcome to our forum nflow-users in Google Groups.