feat(blog): state machine vs workflow, with worked examples

[vandetho]

Adds a deep-dive companion to the existing short state-machine-vs-workflow guide (2026-04-05), which stayed at the "one state vs many states" level.

New post: state-machine-vs-workflow-worked-examples — "State Machine vs Workflow: The Same Domain, Modeled Both Ways".

What's in it

Four worked examples, each with YAML plus the PHP entity and call sites:

1. Order lifecycle as a state_machine — string column, can() / apply()
2. The same order with parallel fulfillment as a workflow — AND-split on pay, AND-join on ship, JSON marking column
3. Article review — the canonical Petri net, guards on individual approvals
4. One ticket, three concurrent lifecycles — why that's three state machines, not one net

Plus the two traps, both checked against Symfony source rather than written from memory:

• from: [a, b] is an OR under state_machine and an AND-join under workflow, because FrameworkBundle expands state-machine transitions into one Transition per from×to pair while workflows keep a single multi-input transition
• to: [x, y] under state_machine fails at container compile with the confusing "A transition from a place/state must have an unique name" message — a consequence of that same expansion

Closes with a decision table, a 4-step state-machine → workflow migration checklist, and a simulator exercise.

Also

The older short post now links to this one at the end, so the two don't compete on search.

Notes

• tsc --noEmit clean; lint-staged (eslint + prettier) ran on commit
• The blog reads from the blogPost table with the static array only as fallback, so this needs pnpm prisma:seed against the target DB before it appears on the live site

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