Re: [Boost-users] [review] Dataflow Review starts today, September 1st

From: Stjepan Rajko (stipe_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-09-02 13:02:35

Hi Marteen,

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 4:48 AM, Maarten Nieber <hallomaarten_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> in the last year, I have been doing a lot of dataflow programming so
> potentially I am very interested in this library. However, I would really
> like to see a documentation page that "sells" the library.
> I would like to see a description of cases that would be difficult,
> timeconsuming or hard to adapt for future requirements when
> implemented without this library, and understand how the library makes life
> easier.
> Instead, the library documentation quickly focuses on the architecture, i.e.
> the different layers in the library.
> There are some examples (VTK, graphical editor), but from these too I cannot
> tell if this library would help me or not.
>

Thanks for your interest.  The documentation for the Dataflow.Signals
layer perhaps shows some more concrete benefits:
http://www.dancinghacker.com/code/dataflow/dataflow/signals.html

In particular, that layer provides a number of components which can be
used with any signal signature, and makes connecting the components
slightly more concise and readable (IMO).

There are also some higher-level benefits that arise from the
architecture itself - for example the fact that the graphical editor
can be used on a variety of underlying dataflow frameworks as long as
they model the right Dataflow concepts. E.g., if you look at:
http://dancinghacker.blip.tv/posts?view=archive&nsfw=dc
..., you'll see the same editor work with three completely different
frameworks, which it can do easily because it uses the generic
dataflow layer to interface with whatever framework it's built with.

What sort of things do you do / would you like to do with dataflow
programming?  If you can tell me a little bit about that, perhaps I
can try to think of some other examples of how the Dataflow library
could (or perhaps couldn't) make your task easier.

Best,

Stjepan