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Most dataflow editors are custom-built for a single application and domain, and can’t easily be re-used by others. So we set out to make a dataflow editor with three primary properties:Įxpanding on these each a little bit: General-purpose But we didn’t want to use a Canvas-based editor, and in particular we wanted to embed the editor into a React application. The ideal interface we pictured was a dataflow editor where the blocks represented different kinds of transformations, with (strongly typed) data flowing through the edges. You lose text selection, accessibility features, all of CSS, and get thrown into “video game world” where you have to construct everything you need from scratch.įor the Underlay project, we wanted to make a data pipeline environment to showcase our algebraic graph data model. This is what you’d expect, since the basic needs of a dataflow editor – absolutely positioning elements on a scrollable canvas, drawing visually pleasing curves, and prioritizing responsive drag-and-drop interactions that involve updating multiple elements at at once – are all relative weaknesses of the DOM, which is designed for hierarchical, nested-box layouts.īut Canvas is a heavy-duty technology, and introduces a sharp discontinuity in a (presumably) otherwise DOM-based application. There are also several browser-based dataflow editors out there, such as litegraph.js and NoFlo, which almost all use Canvas or WebGL to render the nodes and edges. The sheer complexity of dataflow interfaces can be off-putting, but they’ve found their place in plenty of applications that aren’t well-served by more standard UIs. LabVIEW, a proprietary “system-design platform and development environment”.Enso (formerly Luna), a general-purpose visual programming language.Antimony, “CAD from a parallel universe”.Max/MSP, a live music and multimedia programming environment (and its open-source analog Pure Data).Plus, they encourage the user to visualize their data (or whatever the editor is used for) “flowing” through the edges by rendering them as explicit, reified things, instead of just implying relationships through nesting and positioning.ĭataflow interfaces aren’t particularly common to find in the wild, but they are dominant in some niches, like VFX software. You’ve probably seem them before:ĭataflow editors are useful for creating graphs of connections that might be too complex to fit in a traditional hierarchical interface. High-quality React and TypeScript integrationĭataflow editors are a broad class of drag-and-drop-oriented interactive block diagram interfaces.