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Asked: 2026-05-11T03:45:49+00:00

I have been doing a little reading on Flow Based Programming over the last

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I have been doing a little reading on Flow Based Programming over the last few days. There is a wiki which provides further detail. And wikipedia has a good overview on it too. My first thought was, ‘Great another proponent of lego-land pretend programming’ – a concept harking back to the late 80’s. But, as I read more, I must admit I have become intrigued.

  1. Have you used FBP for a real project?
  2. What is your opinion of FBP?
  3. Does FBP have a future?

In some senses, it seems like the holy grail of reuse that our industry has pursued since the advent of procedural languages.

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  1. Interesting discussion! It occurred to me yesterday that part of the confusion may be due to the fact that many different notations use directed arcs, but use them to mean different things. In FBP, the lines represent bounded buffers, across which travel streams of data packets. Since the components are typically long-running processes, streams may comprise huge numbers of packets, and FBP applications can run for very long periods – perhaps even ‘perpetually’ (see a 2007 paper on a project called Eon, mostly by folks at UMass Amherst). Since a send to a bounded buffer suspends when the buffer is (temporarily) full (or temporarily empty), indefinite amounts of data can be processed using finite resources.

    By comparison, the E in Grafcet comes from Etapes, meaning ‘steps’, which is a rather different concept. In this kind of model (and there are a number of these out there), the data flowing between steps is either limited to what can be held in high-speed memory at one time, or has to be held on disk. FBP also supports loops in the network, which is hard to do in step-based systems – see for example http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BrokerageApplication – notice that this application used both MQSeries and CORBA in a natural way. Furthermore, FBP is natively parallel, so it lends itself to programming of grid networks, multicore machines, and a number of the directions of modern computing. One last comment: in the literature I have found many related projects, but few of them have all the characteristics of FBP. A list that I have amassed over the years (a number of them closer than Grafcet) can be found in http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FlowLikeProjects .

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