Flow-Based Programming is interesting
Quite a different way of doing software:
- Application logic is defined by building a graph
- The graph consists of reusable “black box” components, and their connections to each other
- Components can send each other packets through the connections
Done in a right way, this would finally enable true productive visual programming. Maybe the developer tool tablets are waiting for?
I’m currently reading the book on the subject, and building a proof-of-concept implementation in Node.js and CoffeeScript: http://github.com/noflo/noflo
GUI is slowly coming up, powered by jsPlumb:
And after a bit of styling:
There is also a domain-specific language for flow-based programming. The example above, as FBP:
'package.json' -> SOURCE Read(ReadFile) OUT -> IN Split(SplitStr)
Split() OUT -> IN Count(Counter) COUNT -> IN Display(Output)
Read() ERROR -> IN Display()
Added support for generating docs from FBP source files with Docco:
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NoFlo: two years of flow-based programming
NoFlo — the flow-based programming system I started — is now two years old. I pushed the first commits to GitHub on June 5th 2011 from Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. To get us started with the story, I’ll let Wikipedia summarize:
Writing reusable, multi-platform JavaScript with Component
I’m currently in the process of porting the NoFlo Flow-Based Programming environment to run also in the browser. While there are some obvious differences in things like filesystem interaction and component loading, the goal here is to reuse as much of the same code as possible between these two platforms.