It is now a year since our NoFlo Development Environment Kickstarter got funded. Since then our team together with several open source contributors has been busy building the best possible user interface for Flow-Based Programming.

When we set out on this crazy adventure, we still mostly had only NoFlo and JavaScript in mind. But there is nothing inherently language-specific in FBP or our UI, and so when people started making other runtimes compatible with the protocol we embraced the idea of full-stack flow-based programming.

Here is how the runtime registration screen looks with the latest release:

This hopefully highlights a bit of the possibilities of what can be done with Flowhub right now. I know there are several other runtimes that are not yet listed there. We should have something interesting to announce in that space soon!

Live mode

The Flowhub release made today includes several interesting features apart from giving private repository access to our Kickstarter backers. One I’m especially happy about is what we call live mode.

The live mode, initially built by Lionel Landwerlin, enables Flowhub to discover and connect to running pieces of Flow-Based software running in different environments. With it you can monitor, debug, and modify applications without having to restart them!

We made a short demo video of this in action with Flowhub, Raspberry Pi and an NFC tag.

Getting started

Our backers should receive an email today with instructions on how to activate their Flowhub plans. For those who missed the Kickstarter, there should be another batch of Flowhub pre-orders available soon.

Just like with Travis and GitHub, Flowhub is free for open source development. So, everybody should be able to start using it immediately even without a plan.

If you have any questions about Flow-Based Programming or how to use Flowhub, please check out the various ways to get in touch on the NoFlo support page.