Business4s H1 2025 Highlights

We’ve launched Business4s more than a year ago, and a lot has happened since then! Today, I’d love to share with you some of the key developments from the past six months. Our mission remains the same: solving real business problems using Scala in the most practical and enjoyable way possible.

Workflows4s

Our largest and most impactful project to date. Launched in May and showcased shortly after at Scalar, Workflows4s continues to grow steadily.

Highlights since the release:

• SQLite runtime support (docs) — you can now effortlessly run your workflows using extreme sharding and without any DB infrastructure.
• Retry mechanism (docs) —if a workflow execution fails for technical reasons, you can wake it up automatically at a specified future time.
• Workflow registry (docs) — easily manage and monitor created workflow instances and their states.
• Numerous smaller tweaks and bug fixes (it never ends!)

For those craving details on implementation, we regularly publish DevLogs on our Youtube channel!

Google Summer of Code

Announced back in May, all three projects are progressing impressively, and we expect genuinely useful outcomes by summer’s end.

Here is short recap of what we are working on:

• Workflows4s Web UI — Dashboard allowing introspection and interaction with workflows. This also includes http api that can be consumed through other clients.
• ChatOp4s — Prototype of a library for simplified interaction with chat platforms (Slack & Discord are being worked one).

On top of that, our collaboration with Dave (creator of Tyrian) has been especially fruitful. We’ve already discussed several exciting spin-off projects and enhancements, such as improved STTP integration, a Tyrian-UI toolkit, and an upcoming forms library (more details below!)

But Wait, There’s More!

Mentorship Program

We launched our mentorship initiative in November 2024, with two successful rounds happening since then (10 people in total). Ultimately, it’s up to the mentees to judge the program’s success, but initial feedback has been promising. The program paused briefly for GSoC, but it’ll resume after summer — potentially with some refinements to the formula. Want to join the next round? You can sign up now: Mentorship Program

Decisions4s

Stable codebase and growing adoption among companies. Unfortunately Decisions4s is the kind of library you don’t realize you needed until you actually see it in action. If you have some complicated conditional logic in your projects, you may want to check out our documentation or the ScalaIO talk.

Abtesstr

In May, I explored a new library idea focused on A/B testing. While the code itself was promising, it became clear that successful A/B testing solution requires a comprehensive approach enabling business stakeholders to directly manage tests. Since that would have been a bit too ambitious at the time, the project is currently on pause — but may resurface, especially with my deepening Tyrian expertise. Reach out if you’d like to contribute!

Forms4s

Our latest experiment! Forms4s aims to simplify web forms development through automatic form rendering, state management, validation, data extraction and form hydration. It’s being actively developed and will play a key role in the Workflows4s Web UI. Stay tuned for updates, or feel free to peek at its current state on GitHub. 😉

Discord

Business4s was always intended as a community first, ecosystem second. While our Discord is getting busier, we have plenty of room to grow (I will probably write a dedicated article on this topic soon). In the meantime, come chat! Our Discord welcomes discussions not only about Business4s projects but also broader topics like software architecture, design, hiring, company culture, soft skills, picking a tech stack, and technical leadership in general— all from a Scala perspective. If you ever wanted to discuss such topics with liked-minded individuals, this is the place to do it! Join us here.

DomainDocs4s

After the initial experimentation the project was paused due to lack of manpower to fuel it. Lucily, recently one volunteer stepped up and might push it forward. I’d love to form a working group aorund it, so if you’re interested in Scala tooling around domain modelling, please reach out!

Other Goodies

• All projects have been migrated to the new Sonatype Central.
• Scala Steward and Mergify are now managing all our projects, ensuring rapid dependency updates.
• Our contributor base keeps expanding — we’re now at 18 and counting. Let’s aim to 10x that!

Summary

If you want to chat about anything mentioned above (or anything else Scala-related), reach out anytime. Prefer face-to-face conversations? Don’t hesitate to find me at the upcoming Scala Days — I’m always happy to talk!