Bridging Workflow Automation Tools and EMF Modeling Ecosystems

A workflow specification is a detailed description of the steps, activities, and tasks that need to be completed in an automated way to achieve a specific goal. The advent of cloud-based infrastructure has enabled new possibilities, including adopting low-code approaches for service integration. Indeed, low-code development platforms (LCDPs) have recently gained prominence as they permit unskilled people to produce applications with little or no coding. Among LCDPs, integration platforms, such as Zapier, IFTTT, and Make.com, emerged for their cost-effectiveness and to reduce the tediousness of implementing service integrations. In such a context, existing platforms for building workflow automation (i.e., Workflow Automation Tools, WATs) offer pre-built integrations or create connectors to any service with REST APIs for data manipulation. WATs are primarily visual and offer no-code or low-code functionalities to build services. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), on the other hand, is often compared to the low-code movement, and recent studies highlighted the substantial potential for cross-pollination. We experimented with a motivating example of how a WAT, called N8N, and pure MDE ecosystems built in the context of EMF Epsilon can share similarities and offer food for thought in implementing the same workflow scenario. Both approaches maintain pros and cons and show similarities and opportunities. For this reason, as a future direction, we propose a bridging mechanism between WATs and EMF ecosystems.