On: How we designed Dropbox’s ATF – an async task framework

[GordonS]

I clicked the link and I struggle to understand what Cadence is. I found my way to the docs, and came cross reams of text bemoaning how difficult it is to describe Cadence... not helpful?

I get it's something related to workflows, beyond that I have no clue what problem it aims to solve or where or why I'd use it.

[mfateev → GordonS]

Did you click on temporal.io?

It is hard to describe as it is a new way to build distributed applications that doesn't have a commonly agreed name yet.

[dragonwriter → mfateev]

> It is hard to describe as it is a new way to build distributed applications that doesn't have a commonly agreed name yet.

Seems to be a fairly straightforward, minimal (which can be good; that's not a criticism) workflow engine.

[tsurkoprt → mfateev]

new ? really ? this has been around since 1995

[mfateev → tsurkoprt]

Great, show me a single product (besides AWS SWF and Azure durable Task Framework) that has the programming model of Temporal. For example, which product allows to write production code like this that survives any process failures:

  public void execute(String customerId) {
    activities.sendWelcomeEmail(customerId);
    try {
      boolean trialPeriod = true;
      while (true) {
        Workflow.sleep(Duration.ofDays(30));
        activities.chargeMonthlyFee(customerId);
        if (trialPeriod) {
          activities.sendEndOfTrialEmail(customerId);
          trialPeriod = false;
        } else {
          activities.sendMonthlyChargeEmail(customerId);
        }
      }
    } catch (CancellationException e) {
      activities.processSubscriptionCancellation(customerId);
      activities.sendSorryToSeeYouGoEmail(customerId);
    }
  }