Introduction
Project Continuum is an open-source, browser-native visual workflow platform — inspired by KNIME, built for the cloud. You design workflows as a drag-and-drop graph of nodes, and the platform runs them durably: a crashed worker, a dead Kafka broker, or a dropped connection doesn't lose your progress.
Apache 2.0 licensed. No desktop install — the entire IDE runs in your browser.
Why Continuum
- Browser-native canvas — a full IDE experience (Eclipse Theia + React Flow) with zero install.
- Crash-proof execution — powered by Temporal, workflows survive process crashes, network failures, and restarts. Every step retries automatically.
- Real-time streaming — watch workflows execute step-by-step. Kafka streams events to your browser via MQTT over WebSockets. No polling, no refresh.
- Columnar data passing — nodes exchange Apache Parquet tables, not JSON blobs. Fast, compressed, query-ready.
- Extensible by design — add capabilities by deploying new worker services, not by modifying existing ones. Zero downtime, zero coupling.
How it fits together
A workflow is a directed graph of nodes. Each node runs as a Temporal activity dispatched to whichever feature worker registered it — base analytics, cheminformatics, AI/ML, or your own custom worker. See Architecture Overview for the full execution path.
Where to go next
- Getting Started — run the whole platform locally with one
docker compose up. - Architecture — how a workflow actually executes, end to end.
- Feature Nodes — what you can build with today.
- Deployment — running Continuum on Kubernetes.