BPMN.iO served ECA well for years. But the community needed something different - not better, different. Six weeks in early 2026, we built it.
ECA: The Next Chapter
No matter how good the modeler, not everyone can use it.
For years, we heard the same question at conferences, in issue queues, on Slack: "Can we use BPMN for Migrations? Can we use it for AI workflows? Can we use it for Commerce checkout orchestration?"
The answer was always no. ECA started with the right intent - blackbox core, separate UIs, two modelers from day one. But intent isn't architecture. The decoupling was incomplete. Model owners and modelers still knew too much about each other.
Adding a new model owner meant rewriting integration code. Adding a new modeler meant updating every model owner.
Two weeks ago, I stood on a stage in Athens, in front of the Drupal DevDays audience, and walked through 37 years in tech with a long stop at five years of ECA. That was the keynote. This series is something else: a much closer look at the last ten months, because that's when everything started moving faster than I could comfortably keep up with.
It started, as so many things in Drupal seem to, with a conversation with Dries Buytaert.