Getting Started

Welcome to the Axon Workflow Engine Getting Started Guide!

Building reliable business workflows is hard. Order fulfillment, loan applications, employee onboarding—these processes need audit trails, crash recovery, and scalability. Event sourcing delivers all of that, but comes with significant complexity: command handlers, event handlers, saga patterns, and manual state management.

The Axon Workflow Engine bridges that gap. You write simple, imperative business logic, and the engine handles event sourcing, state persistence, and crash recovery automatically.

The engine is built on primitives and composables:

Execution primitives—the core building blocks for workflows:

  • Execute—Run actions and tasks (synchronous or asynchronous)

  • WaitFor—Suspend until an external event arrives

Storage primitives—manage durable workflow state:

  • Payload—Read and modify the workflow payload across steps

Lifecycle primitives—control the workflow’s lifecycle:

  • Terminate—End a workflow (fail, cancel) or cancel individual steps (cancelStep)

Composables—higher-level combinators for step orchestration:

  • allMatch—Guard ensuring all results match a predicate (for example, all steps completed successfully)

  • anyMatch—Race combinator where the first matching result wins (for example, the first event to arrive)

  • noneMatch—Guard ensuring no results match a predicate (for example, no steps failed)

About this tutorial

In this tutorial, you will build an Order Fulfillment workflow that reserves stock, initiates payment, and waits for payment confirmation. Along the way, you will learn the two core execution primitives—Execute and WaitFor:

  1. Project Setup—Add dependencies and define domain events

  2. Your First Workflow—Create a workflow that executes actions and waits for events

Once you’ve completed the tutorial, the Reference Guide covers everything in depth—all overloads, orchestration patterns, lifecycle management, testing, and configuration.

Are you ready? Let’s get started!