Talking Drupal #578 - Rosetta

Today we are talking about Better traceability, better debugging, and Rosetta with guest Jürgen Haas. We'll also cover Maestro as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/578

Topics

• What Is Rosetta
• Rosetta Building Blocks
• Standards and Where to Join
• Rosetta End Goal Question
• Unifying Workflow APIs
• Fail Gracefully and Version
• Scaling Module Integrations
• AI Agents as Another UI
• Tools Discovery Explained
• Dependencies and Determinism
• Hooks Glue Code Reality
• Tracing with OpenTelemetry
• Sensitive Data Guardrails
• Big Challenges and Help
• Tool API Adoption Status
• Defining Rosetta Success

Resources

• One trace, inside and outside Drupal: a proposal for Rosetta
• Write a setting's rules once, in config schema, and use them for validation, forms and the published JSON SchemaMaestro
• Orchestration
• Dries blog post
• W3C open telemetry
• Drupal open telemetry

Guests

Jürgen Haas - lakedrops.com jurgenhaas

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Emma Horrell - emma-horrell

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to model a multi-step business process on your Drupal site, like a review and approval flow that routes tasks to different people, branches on their decisions, and can even hand steps off to AI? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Maestro
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Jun 2010 by Blaine Lang (blainelang) of Nextide, and is now co-maintained with Randy Kolenko (_randy)
  • Versions available: 4.6.0, which works with Drupal 10.3 and 11, and 3.1.4, which also supports Drupal 9.4 through 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, 4.6.0 came out last week
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation: a handbook on drupal.org, plus a series of videos, including AI and agentic examples
  • Number of open issues: 189 open issues, 55 of which are bugs, but many date back to the Drupal 7 and 8 branches, and half a dozen issues were closed just last week
• Usage stats:
  • 785 sites
• Module features and usage
  • Maestro's tagline sums it up: if it can be flow-charted, it can be automated with Maestro
  • You build a workflow template in a visual drag-and-drop editor, and 4.6 adds a new ReactFlow-based editor as an alternative to the older diagram-js one
  • Templates are made of tasks: interactive ones assigned to a user or role, plus non-interactive ones like If, And, Or, can set a process variable, batch functions, and spawn a sub-flow
  • That gives you parallel approvals, serial steps, and dynamic routing, for example taking a different path depending on whether someone clicked Accept or Reject
  • Each user gets a Task Console listing what's assigned to them, and tasks can be reassigned or delegated
  • Under the hood, a background engine Maestro calls the orchestrator and does the work of advancing each process. You run it via a tokenized URL, cron, or drush maestro:orchestrate, and if it isn't running, nothing moves forward, so that's the first thing to set up
  • Since 4.1 there's an AI task, built on the AI module, which can return a yes/no or true/false result that the next If task can route on, or store the response in a process variable
  • There's also a Tool task for calling Tool API tools directly with no AI involved, and AI tools that let an agent list, start, and check on Maestro workflows
  • New in 4.6, a trace v