Jürgen Haas Proposes One UI for Drupal Orchestration

A single interface could eventually let Drupal users build workflows without deciding which automation engine should execute each step, according to a proposal from Jürgen Haas, founder of LakeDrops and a maintainer of ECA. Haas outlined the idea on 16 September 2026 in his ECA: The Next Chapter series. Users would choose capabilities such as collecting data, waiting for approval or communicating with an external service from one canvas, while the platform would determine where those steps run. Haas makes clear that no Drupal interface currently combines components from multiple workflow engines in this way.

Several pieces that could support such an interface already exist across Drupal's automation ecosystem. Haas points to ECA for event-driven automation, Maestro for processes that can wait on human activity, FlowDrop for typed data flows and Tool API for executable steps with defined inputs and outputs. The Orchestration module currently connects Drupal with Activepieces, while support for platforms such as n8n remains future work. Haas argues that characteristics of a step, including whether it waits for a person, outlives a request, communicates outside Drupal or carries typed data used by an AI agent, could eventually become metadata that lets the platform choose an execution engine automatically.

Several architectural pieces would still have to be built before that experience is possible. Haas identifies a composite model owner that can expose components from multiple systems on one canvas, a dispatcher that routes each step to the appropriate engine and returns its results, and a shared contract for passing data between engines. The DropTimes previously covered discussions among ECA, FlowDrop and Maestro maintainers around shared workflow concepts, terminology and data contracts. Haas's proposal extends that work toward a common user experience while explicitly distinguishing the architecture that already exists from the unified interface that does not. His full argument is available in Everybody Orchestrates. Most Do It by Hand.