What Is Didact? ​

Didact is an open source, standalone, fullstack .NET job orchestration platform. Almost the entire platform is written exclusively in C# with the exception of Didact UI, which is a VueJS-powered web dashboard.

Code First ​

As a developer myself, I love using code to solve problems. Although they have their place, I am often turned off from no-code/low-code platforms for data engineering and background job processing. At the end of the day, code allows you, the developer, to be as creative and innovative as you want, and I wanted Didact to support that creativity.

As such, when you are designing your background jobs, data pipelines, and workflows, Didact is a code-first solution: no drag-and-drop builders, no complicated GUI, just raw C# code.

Fullstack ​

Many background job libraries and job orchestrators in .NET don't ship with a user interface of any kind. There are a few exceptions here and there like Hangfire, but often times you are lucky if you even find a legible README.md in the project's repo.

Didact ships with a VueJS web dashboard, powered by Tailwind CSS (because I stink at raw CSS) and Flowbite. It's aptly named Didact UI.

Standalone ​

One very important distinction that I would like to make right from the beginning is that Didact is a platform, not a library.

Contrary to other .NET background job libraries like Hangfire, Quartz.NET, and Coravel, Didact is not meant to be a set of nuget packages that you add to a pre-existing application. Rather, Didact is self-contained, entirely independent of and separate from other applications. This opens up an array of interesting use cases and implementations for Didact which you can read more about on the Use Cases page.

Architecture ​

Specifically, Didact has several different sub-applications that are pre-written and offered to you as is, namely:

• Didact Engine: the .NET Web API that doubles as both the REST API and the main execution engine for your background jobs, called Flows.
• Didact UI: the VueJS web dashboard frontend.
• Didact Sentinel: the console application that functions as a watcher and helper for Didact Engine.
• Didact Core: the primary nuget package that exposes important classes and interfaces for your Flows and Blocks.

And for simplicity's sake, all of these applications are aggregated and offered under a primary, release repository simply named Didact.

These applications are designed in such a way that your background job processing, data pipelines, and workflows work more as a plug-and-play system. Your only concern should be deploying these applications as-is and then designing your Flows in your class library project.

Isolated ​

The actual magic where your background jobs and data pipelines run is defined in an isolated, central class library project. This is where you define your Flows, a term synonymous in the Didact Platform with background job, data pipeline, or workflow.

Your Flows exist in this class library project, totally separate from the rest of your codebase.

Open Source ​

Didact's codebase is open source and available for inspection, forking, and modification on GitHub. It is released under the AGPLv3 open source license and offers a few different monetization options for project sustainability.

See the Licensing and Monetization page for more details.