Hello,
I am researching the possibility of creating a UI on top of the Temporal service to design workflows graphically. Does anyone have any information or articles showing the best way to do this?
Great question!
As an example of a popular open source tool you could learn from is Camunda, they seem to do a great work in this area!
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Interesting! Thank you. Does Camunda compete with Temporal? Or are they two different things?
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Hey, while Camunda has some similarities on the surface level to Temporal, the way we approach problems is very different.
Temporal is a code-first runtime made by engineers, for engineers. Our biggest focus has been on creating an engine which can scale and serve practically any business use case. Camunda is more focused on enabling developers to surface controls/information to non-technical users in their company. They have put a lot of effort into visual layers for human operators and for composing workflows visually.
In the distant future we plan to either provide these capabilities ourselves, or support community efforts that provide them. Our belief is that if we get the core engine right, we can eventually use it as a foundation to handle everything else.
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There are multiple companies using Temporal to create UI based workflows. The core idea is that for workflow UI to be really useful it has to be use case specific. Then you can write a workflow using Temporal SDK that interprets the use case specific DSL generated from the UI.
Here is an example of DSL based workflow implementation.
Problem with Camunda and similar tools that they try to create non use case specific UI which requires a lot of compromises. So the compromise is not friendly for developers and is not simple enough for non-technical people to implement end to end workflows.
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Yes, I agree. I have experienced that problem of a workflow UI which is too complicated for non-technical and too limited for developers. That is what brought me to Temporal.
Thanks guys for these great responses. Very helpful. Thanks for the link to the code!
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Great to know that there are already efforts on the Workflow-UI. Can you name the products/companies that are using Temporal to create UI based workflows?
We don’t have any public references from those companies. It would be nice if any of them comment here.
Hi everyone, I’m also interested in this. Are there any updates on the UI for workflows?
Hi @g_e , welcome to the community.
Have a look to this community meetup presentation by Salty, they are using x-state on top of temporal.
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That demo was awesome. Looking into x-state now. I wish they shared how they created that navigable 3d diagram though. I don’t see that capability in x-state.