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by coltmcnealy 92 days ago
We just launched LittleHorse Server 1.0: an open-source workflow engine for Business-as-Code (SDKs in Java, Python, C#, and GoLang), built for microservices, event-driven systems, and long-running processses.

Business-as-Code lets you write code that orchestrates your business process at a high level, while handling low-level integration for you. Similar idea to Infrastructure-as-Code but for your business process logic rather than infra configuration.

LH also has a two-way integrations with Kafka: our Kafka Connectors signal waiting workflows or trigger new ones, and the Output Topic produces a CDC-style stream of workflow events into Kafka.

Would love feedback if you're dealing with stuff like retries / DLQ's / SAGA / Outbox Pattern, etc.

1 comments

Congrats on the launch!

You may be under-selling LittleHorse a bit (here and even in the README). Few things I find cool about it:

- How easy it makes writing human-in-loop workflows (or these days, agent-in-loop). Everyone wants human-in-loop, but very few workflow frameworks make it simple.

- Using LittleHorse to introduce stateful guardrails to agentic flows. This helps with context compaction and other safety issues.

- The new (experimental?) generation of workflows from JSON. This simplifies things quite a bit.

Generating workflows from JSON is actually not new but rather old...the first versions only had that and we added the DSL in Java (and other languages) after that. Under the hood everything in our system is protobuf and it's trivial to translate from JSON to proto and such
Gotta agree with Gwen. I've been using LittleHorse for some AI projects and it does an amazing job. I'm processing thousands of workflows simultaneously and it adapts to the changes in my environment quite well.