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I've just gotten back into Erlang becuase of the lightweight processes and message passing, so far behaviour has been secondary (i.e. just learning about them)!

The project is about bring visual Flow Based Programming(FBP)[1] to Erlang. FBP seems to be made for Erlang and I was surprised there was something already but there does not seem to be.

My goto tool for FBP is Node-RED and hence the basic idea is to bolt a Node-RED frontend on to an Erlang backend and to have every node being a process. Node-REDs frontend is great for modelling message passing between nodes, hence there is a very simply one-to-one mapping to Erlangs processes and messages.

I've implemented some basics and started to create some unit tests as flows to slowly build up functionality. I would really like this to be 100% compatiable to Node-RED the NodeJS backend. For more details, the github repo --> https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red

Overall Erlang is amazingly well suited to this and astonished that no one else has done anything like this - or have they?

[1] = https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/index.html






Oh that's really cool to see! I always thought a visual programming language on the BEAM would be fun

Love the idea as well! Would I be wrong in thinking that, at a high-level, fbp is like erlang processes where message flow is one way?

Yes indeed! fbp is, at its core, forward message passing with message being independent of one another. it would be interesting to know how much the creators of erlang knew of fbp.

This is a really cool idea!

Thank you, it's also a lot of fun to do :)

Hopeful I can get some useful functionality together without hitting my Erlang coding limits!

Any help is greatly appreciated :+1:




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