This is part of our ongoing exploration of ECA's evolution, "ECA: The Next Chapter". Earlier posts covered the journey from Vienna to Athens, the Modeler API, in-context customization, the new
ECA: The Next Chapter
At every conference, someone corners me at the coffee table. They ask it carefully, the way you ask about a friend's divorce. "So... ECA, FlowDrop, Maestro. Aren't you three competing? Splitting the community?"
Fair question. Three modules. All draw boxes and connect them with arrows. From a distance, three teams building the same thing three times.
I've been building workflows blind for years. Configure a model, save it, deploy, trigger an event, check logs, guess what went wrong. Repeat. Slow, frustrating, error-prone.
When we talked to existing ECA users during UX research in late 2025, they didn't ask for more actions or events. They asked for visibility. "This is what we've waited for the most," they said.
BPMN.iO served ECA well for years. But the community needed something different - not better, different. Six weeks in early 2026, we built it.
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.