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Nice. So this is basically a replacement for SWF (Simple Workflow Service) that allows you to build the decision steps using a GUI/JSON and allows you to execut

Nice. So this is basically a replacement for SWF (Simple Workflow Service) that allows you to build the decision steps using a GUI/JSON and allows you to execute tasks using either Lambda or the traditional activity pollers. Building a multi-step workflow that handles branching, retries and failure just got a lot easier. I was hoping they would do something like this, working with SWF has always felt unnecessarily complicated. The Java Flow Framework just felt like an awkward abstraction to me, but this makes a lot more sense. Combine this with their new AWS Batch service and I think people are going to save countless man hours that would have otherwise been spent working on repetitive, undifferentiated code.

cle 10y ago
The Flow Framework is an abomination to engineering, and should die a pathetic death. Liberal annotations, codegen, aspect weaving and bytecode manip, requires a special JUnit test runner--it embodies all the aspects of the Java culture that I despise. I rather like the idea of SWF, but its API is too low-level, it has poor tooling, and the workflow/activity versioning is awkward and makes the systems too rigid. I am glad that AWS is moving to data-driven workflow definitions, that means they can build much better operational tooling (like the GUI) to manage and understand workflow executions.