Flowbased polymer

minimizing the gap between idea and its expression

Flowbased-polymer is a polymer implementation (behaviour) of Flow-Based Programming (FBP-inspired System). Separating the control flow of web applications from the actual software logic.

Write your applications like you make the concept for your application. Normaly you draw a few components and some arrows to connect the components to describe your intention. Why you don’t do the same to write your app or component?

Use existing web-components and wire them to build your application.

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Features

  • Clear, simple and expressive syntax. There are only a few concepts you have to know, to write your own web application.

  • Compatible with every web-component.

  • Wire existing components to write your own reusable components or application.

See the getting started section for instructions how to get it up and running.

– Just as in the preparation and consumption of food there are the two roles of cook and diner, in FBP application development there are two distinct roles: the component builder and the component user or application designer. The component builder decides the specification of a component, which must also include constraints on the format of incoming data IPs (including option IPs) and the format of output IPs. The specification should not describe the internal logic of the component, although attributes sometimes “leak” from internal to external (restrictions on use are usually of this type). The application designer builds applications using already existing components, or, where satisfactory ones do not exist, s/he will specify a new component, and then see about getting it built.

Component designers and users may of course be the same people, but there are two very different types of skill involved. This is somewhat like the designer of a recent popular game, who admitted he was not particularly fast at solving it - his skill was in designing games, not in playing them. The separation between makers and users is so widespread in real life that we don’t pay any attention to it unless it breaks down. In industry, as Wayne Stevens points out, we take for granted the idea that airplane builders do not build their own chairs - they subcontract them to chair manufacturers, who in turn subcontract the cloth to textile manufacturers and so on. In contrast, the world of conventional programming is as if every builder designed his own nails, lumber and dry-wall from scratch. Talk about “reinventing the wheel” - in conventional application development we reinvent the rubber, the nuts and bolts, and even the shape of the wheel! [van Norstand Rheinhold, Flow based Programming (1994). Page 53]