The NoFlo Development Environment is a client-side web application that helps users to build and run flow-based programs built with NoFlo and other compatible FBP systems.
The NoFlo UI is still under heavy development. See the Kickstarter project for the full explanation of what is to come.
Full FBP projects stored on version control are not yet supported.
Sketches are flow-based programs that are only stored locally in your browser's LocalStorage. These are intended for lightweight experimentation before actually moving the flows to real projects.
The sketches follow the same format as the example Gists explained below.
In addition to graphs developed by users, the NoFlo UI is able to load and run examples shared as Gists. The Gists used should contain a noflo.json file providing a JSON graph definition used for the example.
The examples should also provide the necessary information for running the example inside the environment key of the graph propeties:
runtime:htmlfor client-side flows,websocketfor Node.js server-side flowscontent: optional HTML contents to insert into the UIs preview cardwidth: optional width of the preview card in pixelsheight: optional height of the preview card in pixels
Please refer to an example Gist in https://gist.github.com/bergie/6608098 (you can also run it).
In addition to being able to manage and run client-side NoFlo flows, the NoFlo UI is also able to run server-side NoFlo code (and indeed anything else compatible with the API). For NoFlo flows running on Node.js, you need to install and run noflo-ui-server.
In addition to the web version, the NoFlo UI also also packaged as a PhoneGap mobile app. This will enable us to provide it in an easier way and without unnecessary browser chrome to popular platforms like iOS and Android.
To be able to work on the NoFlo UI you need a checkout of this repository and a working Node.js installation. Go to the checkout folder and run:
$ npm install
You also need the Grunt build tool:
$ sudo npm install -g grunt-cli
This will provide you with all the needed development dependencies. Now you can build a new version by running:
$ grunt build
If you prefer, you can also start a watcher process that will do a rebuild whenever one of the files changes:
$ grunt watch
Serve the UI using a webserver, then open the URL it in a web browser. Example:
$ npm install simple-server
$ ./node_modules/.bin/simple-server .
In addition to this project, the other repository of interest is the the-graph graph editor widget used for editing flows.
The HTML runtime of NoFlo utilizes a custom Component.io build of NoFlo that includes most of the common NoFlo component libraries that work with the browser. If you need to add new libraries, edit the preview/component.json file and rebuild.
Even though the UI itself is built with NoFlo, it isn't talking directly with that for running and building graphs. Instead, it is utilizing the FBP Network Protocol which enables it to talk to any compatible FBP system.
If you want to integrate the UI with a new environment you need to provide some transport layer (for example, WebSockets) that can talk the protocol, and then implement runtime access for that in the UI. For showing the state of the runtime you may also want to implement a dataflow plugin.
