About

What is the Wrench?

theWrench is an open source platform developed to reduce the time and cost of developing and testing rules-centric microservices.

Design philosophy

theWrench design is based on a minimalist approach to streamline its internal complexity and maintain focus on the areas that really matter: e.g, simplicity of use, ease of deployment and management, etc.

Deployment model

theWrench deployment model is container-based; thus, it is well-suited to cloud environments with minimal additional effort. Today, theWrench-based services and applications have been deployed in all major cloud environments, and as it is based on Java, it runs in any environment where Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is installed.

Creating tasks and flows

The platform comes with theWrench Composer tool, which gives the user the power of defining tasks (processes which are executed when a service is called) and creating logical links between sequences of tasks. For this, theWrench provides low-code tools for defining processes and rules using the concept of decision tables.

Flexibility, efficiency, speed

One of theWrench’s great benefits is that users can create, edit, and test on the fly; thus, the development lifecycle can be kept in-house with significantly shorter and more simplified routes from development to production. The number of man hours required to create and test Wrench microservices is also greatly reduced, as there is no need to outsource development and testing.

What is more, users have full freedom to write and integrate into any desired system using the power of Java.

How does Wrench achieve the creation of a microservice?

The Wrench follows a specific pattern to create a microservice: Flow, Decision Table, Service Task, and Manual Task, all of which are defined as “theWrench Assets”.

The highest level of theWrench Assets is the Flow, which is used to link other theWrench assets to tasks that, in turn, form the given process that is executed as a microservice is called.

Each of theWrench Assets is automatically version controlled and thus, can always be easily reverted back to if needed. In short, assets can be tested directly. This inbuilt testing functionality greatly speeds up the development process and encourages an incremental development approach; i.e., change, test and, if ready, deploy.

How is theWrench different from other platforms?

Minimalistic approach. theWrench provides UI level components to those areas where it makes sense and can be done without complexity.
Open and extendable directly. Flow tasks are Java code, and a user can use any Java library to incorporate needed functionality. What is more, this creates transparency, and as such, the code is visible to everyone. Container-based deployment model. Deployment and runtime issues are handled outside of theWrench itself.
Open source. Using open source products gives the user licensing freedom, freedom from vendor lock-in, transparency into the code base, and much more.