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Comment by Grimm1 | Hacker News Reader

"However, their marketing tries to sell themselves as no-code platform for business folks."

Huh? I've never seen Airflow described as no code or tried to sell itself that way, in fact all the pipelines are written in python and you can do some really complex orchestration.

I get you're not saying Airflow is no code but that the category you've put it in is typically low code or marketed as low code, but then I don't think Airflow belongs in that category or rather, and maybe more accurately, no/low code is not really a major defining quality of the bucket you're calling "Process Designers".

I've also been calling them "Process Schedulers" because typically it involves translating a more manual, but well defined process into it's automated phase.

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I would agree.

The no-code is an illusion in the enterprise realm - before you know it, you are waist deep in the custom code.

No-code can really work only for small businesses imo.

I come from enterprise background and that is one of the reasons I built Titanoboa - to make something that makes it easy to rapidly prototype new integrations on the fly.

I summed up some of my thoughts on this topic here: https://www.titanoboa.io/repl.html

The main point I am trying to test with Titanoboa is this however:

State Machines <-> Process Designers is a spectrum and one product could handle the entire spectrum (or part of it).

Titanoboa makes it possible to pre-define workflow steps and make it "no code" while also making complex custom integrations possible from the same environment with the same concepts. Plus also distributed data handling is in the mix.

I guess now the challenge is how to market this versatility or whether it could create more confusion...

This is not true in many use cases. There are tons of ways to handle low code/no code. It is a very hard problem to solve, and vendors end up building basic "low-code" wrappers around API endpoints, and that's why it looks like a lost cause.

Done right, (we are a living proof it can be done, at Syncari), one can do a lot of stuff done without any coding

Do you have any links to some blog posts discussing it (the "doing it right" approach)? I would agree that it definitely depends on the use case.

I will definitely check out Syncari - just opened the landing page and it looks great!

Thanks! Haven't had a chance to write a lot about this (heads down building and selling), but https://syncari.com/a-brief-history-of-todays-data-woes-and-... touches on it a bit.

For us, it is about:

* implementing deep integrations that are commonplace

* not spraying too thin in the quest of supporting hundreds of systems

* thinking from a data model/data/eventually consistent system perspective

* completely dropping the reactive/trigger based/if-this-then-that point-to-point model.

Thanks Neelesh for the link, I like the way of thinking with the focus on data.

It is similar with what I am seeing - i.e. lots of older integration systems are terrible with data simply because they force you to use some way of data modeling (e.g. their OOP data models, WSDLs/XSDs etc.) while the newer ones just rely on json which is good but can lack the (sometimes necessary) complexity. To do some data cleansing on the way then seems like an unachievable task (there is certainly such a thing as overdose on XSLT ;) ).

I also like the approach you took with centralized data dictionary - it certainly is something the industry might need, I would wonder how it impacts change management though (especially in bigger companies).

Wishing you good luck!

I see what you are getting at. Yes State Machines to Process Designers is a spectrum and has a quite a bit of overlappings.

For example these are the lowest common denominators I see.

#1 Graph: All of these systems allow you to visually design/represent the process as a graph. You yourself has abstracted these into graph problems and have come out with a simpler non-verbose BPMN alternative - which is great.

#3 Computability: Since the base is a definitive graph, essentially a graph that could execute is a finite-automata. That is, all of these systems put the power back to the end-users to create their own machines (without actually coding) hence the relatability with low-code. So at the end, broadly even the motive aligns from computability perspective.

But I'm still not convinced these denominators justify an all-in-one one-size-fits-all solution to this spectrum. I'm not saying one product shouldn't attack them all, but it's better to appropriately categorize them and develop unique features on top of each of them. At least that is what I feel at this point of time.

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