I once dabbled in a bit of Flow-based programming to develop a visual 'pipe' program in Java, to the point where the basics worked including plug-ins, visual editing, etc. However, I believe others have superceded my work with actual released projects :-)
But I'm curiously interested in developing something similar in perl with some sort of GUI. The back-end really isn't that hard, and with typelessness of perl, data transfer's a lot easier to handle. The fun, of course, comes when it's time to set up all the intra-process pipes and threads. Ugh. :-)
But to come down to the point, there's several different ways to think of flow-based programming. The one that seems to be most popular is that as used with Macromedia's products, where you have a flow-chart, and user-interactions determine which way you go down it. In this case, this is much less like flow-based programming than procedural programming with events. On the other hand, something where data flow is unaided by the user save to initiate it, whether part of a gui or not, is more interesting to think about.
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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com
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"You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
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There's also Max
from Opcode Systems. I've played with it (a visual programming
tool that lets you do anything with midi and serial cables),
a friend was able to turn seismographic live from California
into body-shaking sonics at a Tokyo art museum. The interface
(which animates as it runs, and can be pulled and tweaked on
the fly) is very good for technical artists.
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