Flowhub is now in Public Beta

Flowhub is a web-based IDE for flow-based programming. It is built on NoFlo.js for both client and server. It can connect to any language or environment that can talk the FBP Network Protocol.

Which is kind of nonsense unless I'm already clear what "flow-based programming" was. Which I wasn't until I google'd that. Maybe its me. It seems if you're going to promote a new tool with for a obscureish programming paradigm you might want to explain the paradigm as well.

And some demos:

Photo booth: http://app.flowhub.io/#example/7804187

Animated clock: http://app.flowhub.io/#example/7135158

Canvas pattern generator: http://app.flowhub.io/#example/1319c76fe006fb34c9c9

For example, I think it could be a great fit for business intelligence and data analysis, since DFP really is a pretty natural way to think about data transformation and aggregation, and most people that would not be able to understand a map/reduce function or a complex Python notebook would probably be able to understand a flowchart-like diagram showing the transformations applied to the incoming data.

Business process automation could be another great use case for this technology, since it's also natural to think of a business process as a flowchart.

The advantage of these specialized use cases is that you don't have to reinvent programming from scratch to make them work.

In my opinion there should be no destructive critics in any "Show HN" thread.

If you find some mistakes or whatever, you could make a constructive critic, ie: Hey guys, IMHO you should add more info in the landing page, because I am not understanding what your project does.

On the other hand, as someone posted in this thread you could tell them: "You're not the only one who had no clue. [...] And I'm not wasting another second of my time on flowhub.."

Is that the kind of answer that a fellow hacker deserves?? I don't think so.

Remember that people do not post projects at HN only to reach a big audience, but also to get a great feedback from smart people. So before giving impolite answers, we should remember that we are all in the same boat, and the next "Show HN" thread could be your project. Think about the kind of answers you would like to get.

PS:I know that most of the people at HN is great people, but I think this needed to be said today.

Here is a quickly Googled screenshot:

http://wwwasdoc.web.cern.ch/wwwasdoc/lhcpp/irisexplorer.gif

IRIS Explorer was awesome, but hardware was not really up to the job in those days. There was also a rich market in GIS and other applications that did what you needed so there was no way you were going to roll your own with IRIS Explorer.

However, the scope and ambition to do stuff with it was incredible. It was far beyond the flat (as in non-3D) internet we have ended up with.

IRIS Explorer was 'flow programming'. You did not have to use it to overlay a vegetation map over a terrain map to render it in 3D and step through the seasons, with widgets to control al aspects of the show, you could use it to render something lame if you wanted to.

Despite the awesome-ness of IRIS Explorer it failed in the marketplace. This was not because of hardware or that there weren't milliions of code modules to casually wire up. For me, trying to do things with it, the problem was because of the 'black boxes'. Sure they had pretty controls on them and you could pump your data in and out of them with a few mouse clicks. However, at some stage you had to go inside those black boxes and work out what was going on. A box could have '2 + 2 = 4' inside it but there was all kinds of toolkit code to take the inputs and set the outputs. A couple of lines of code would do, but those black boxes had a lot of cruft with them. All very off-putting. So, if 'flow programming' with flowhub is to get anywhere, there needs to be an easy gradient between the 'as per the video' way it works and the reality, i.e. inside the black boxes.

And I know a lot of this is promo-copy, but this kind of stuck out to me:

> Focus on the right areas without fear of constant conflicts, code reviews and lengthy onboarding processes.

Again, I'm not experienced in the flow-paradigm...but I just have to guess that the need for code reviews is not because traditional code is not visual enough. In fact, I'd argue quite the opposite... a visual diagram offers some great big-picture benefits, but at the loss of granularity...if anything, I'd think a flow-based paradigm would require as much code review as before, but perhaps with a different mindset.

I also think the background image for "Drag, Drop, Connect, Build" is...not inspiring to me. I mean, it's useful in some respects for overview of dependencies, maybe...but dragging-dropping and interpretation of visual symbols is not always more efficient than pure textual concepts. In fact, I'd argue that it can be even less efficient. How easy is it to examine the underlying abstractions behind connecting one pipe from one icon to another?

I'm using the latest Firefox Aurora release and I am getting very sluggish scrolling and slow loading on the main page. I wish this trend of gigantic slide-able pictures and animated transitions would stop. Yes, it feels like I'm browsing through a tablet/phone app, but I'm on a desktop, I'd love to have a desktop experience.

Sorry for the rant, the application itself seems nice though.

EDIT: also please don't force people to register and login to try the app, if I can't just get on the page and try it without giving away some private data, I don't really feel tempted to try it at all.

Bergie has a lot of content on his blog as well (http://bergie.iki.fi).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer

I get text based programming. Find a way to quickly connect that experience with flow programming, and conversion rate on this site will improve.

Can this be scoped better? I'm willing to give access to one public repo.

e: Tried example. I don't get it. It's like coding with a mindmap or something?