iwf

iWF project - main & server repo

For most long running applications, iWF is a All-In-One solution to replace Database, MessageQueue and ElasticSearch.

It will not make you a 10x developer...but you may feel like one!

It's a simple and powerful WorkflowAsCode general purpose workflow engine.

Back by Cadence/Temporal as an interpreter.

Related projects:

• iWF Java SDK and Java SDK API review
• iWF Java Samples
• iWF Golang SDK
• API schema

What & Why

If you are familar with Cadence/Temporal

• See Slide deck for what problems it is solving
• See Design doc for how it works

If you are not

• Check out this doc to understand some history

iWF is a application platform that provides you a comprehensive tooling:

• WorkflowAsCode for highly flexibile/customizable business logic
• Parallel execution of multiple threads of business
• Intermidiate states stored as "QueryAttributes" and can be retrived by APIs
• Receiving data from external system by Signal
• Searchable attributes that can be used for flexible searching, even full text searching, backed by ElasticSearch
• Durable timer, and cron job scheduling
• Reset workflow to let you recover the workflows from bad states easily
• ...
• Basically with iWF, you mostly don't need any database, messageQueue or even ElasticSearch to build your applications

How to build & run

• Run make bins to build the binary iwf-server
• Then run ./iwf-server start to run the service . This defaults to serve workflows APIs with Temporal interpreter implementation. It requires to have local Temporal setup. See Run with local Temporal.
• Alternatively, run ./iwf-server --config config/development_cadence.yaml start to run with local Cadence. See below instructions for setting up local Cadence.
• Run make integTests to run all integration tests. This by default requires to have both local Cadence and Temporal to be set up.

Development

Update IDL and generated code

1. Install openapi-generator using Homebrew if you haven't. See more documentation
2. Check out the idl submodule by running the command: git submodule update --init --recursive
3. Run the command git submodule update --remote --merge to update IDL to the latest commit
4. Run make idl-code-gen to refresh the generated code

Run with local Temporalite

1. Run a local Temporalite following the instruction. If you see error error setting up schema, try use command temporalite start --namespace default -f my_test.db instead to start.
2. Go to http://localhost:8233/ for Temporal WebUI

NOTE: alternatively, go to Temporal-dockercompose to run with docker

1. For attribute_test.go integTests, you need to register search attributes:

tctl adm cl asa -n CustomKeywordField -t Keyword
tctl adm cl asa -n CustomIntField -t Int

Run with local Cadence

1. Run a local Cadence server following the instructions
2. Register a new domain if not haven cadence --do default domain register
3. Go to Cadence http://localhost:8088/domains/default/workflows?range=last-30-days

Development Plan

1.0

• Start workflow API
• Executing start/decide APIs and completing workflow
• Parallel execution of multiple states
• Timer command
• Signal command
• SearchAttributeRW
• QueryAttributeRW
• StateLocalAttribute
• Signal workflow API
• Query workflow API
• Get workflow API
• Search workflow API

1.1

• Reset workflow API (Cadence only, TODO for Temporal)
• Command type(s) for inter-state communications (e.g. internal channel)
• More workflow start options: IdReusePolicy, initial earch attributes, cron schedule, retry, etc
• StateOption: Start/Decide API timeout and retry
• Reset workflow by stateId

1.2

• AnyCommandCompleted Decider trigger type and WaitForMoreResults in StateDecision
• Decider trigger types: AnyCommandClosed
• Skip timer API for testing/operation
• LongRunningActivityCommand
• Failing workflow details
• Auto ContinueAsNew
• StateOption: more AttributeLoadingPolicy
• StateOption: more CommandCarryOverPolicy