Along with close Spring integration, Johnson cited these distinguishing features of Embabel:
- Embabel introduces a planning step. The framework discovers actions and goals from application code, and plans toward the most appropriate goal given user or other system input. Planning is accomplished via a non-LLM AI algorithm that provides a deterministic and explainable approach to planning.
- Embabel encourages building a rich domain model in an application, typically Kotlin data classes or Java records. This ensures that prompts are type-safe, tool-able, and survive refactoring. It also allows behavior to be added to domain objects, which can be exposed as LLM tools as well as used in code.
Johnson said that while Embabel embraces the Model Context Protocol, a higher-level orchestration technology is needed. The reasons include the need for explainability, discoverability, the ability to mix models, the ability to inject guardrails at any point in a flow, the ability to manage flow execution, composability of flows at scale, and safer integration with existing systems such as databases, where it is dangerous to allow write access to LLMs, Johnson noted.
“It’s early, but we have big plans,” said Johnson. “We want not just to build the best agent platform on the JVM, but to build the best agent platform, period.”
