Support for a non-decorator API to register workflows and steps

[dangdennis]

I’ve been building a Clojure application and would like to use the Java sdk. In order to do so neatly, I’d prefer if there is a non-decorator based API. This would make the SDK more ergonomic to use from Clojure.

There is a workaround right now where I author thin workflows and steps that call out to my Clojure core. But I’ve yet to determine how to wrap the datasource transaction api. Also have a workaround - just write idempotent transactions anyhow.

[devhawk]

Note, work related to this discussion is tracked by Issue #380

This is possible to do on the 0.8 release, but it needed a better developer experience. PR #382 improved the developer experience to the point that I was able to build (with AI assistance) a 10 line register-workflow function in Clojure for a port of our standard DBOS Starter app.

I'm not a Clojure developer (yet!). I have no idea about conventions and best practices in this community. I'd love to have an official Clojure wrapper library, but I have some outstanding questions:

• General packaging and distribution of clojure libraries. Can I integrate a Clojure library into my existing Gradle based repo? Can I include the Clojure code in the main DBOS transact package like the Kotlin extensions or so I need to have a separate library? Are they published to Maven Central like other JVM libraries?
• What APIs need to be built/wrapped beyond register-workflow?
• For register-workflow, how does Clojure handle optional parameters like maxRecoveryAttempts and SerializationStrategy? And is there a way to build register-workflow so that you don't have to specify the arity explicitly?