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

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, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, H2
• Open Source under EUPL

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>5.7.0</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 the next sections for creating your own workflow definitions.

Note! Starting from 4.0.0 release, nFlow requires Java 8 or newer. Older releases require Java 7 or newer.

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.