flowflow

Flowflow is a term used to describe a style of system design in which processing is organized as flowing data between modular components connected by explicit data channels. Drawing on ideas from flow-based programming and dataflow architectures, flowflow emphasizes composability, stateless or event-sourced components, and dynamic routing of data tokens through a graph of processing nodes. Execution is typically driven by streams of data and supports backpressure, parallelism, and incremental computation.

Components and model: A flowflow system consists of nodes that perform transformations, inputs and outputs called ports, and connectors that carry data tokens. A central flow engine schedules node execution based on token availability, while state is kept locally or in external stores. Data lineage, observability, and deterministic processing semantics are emphasized to aid debugging and auditing.

History and status: The term flowflow emerged in professional discussions during the 2010s as a descriptive label rather than a single standard. Various open-source projects and vendor platforms describe their architectures using flowflow-inspired concepts, sometimes under different names, with syntax and runtime trade-offs.

Applications and benefits: Used in real-time data pipelines, IoT automation, integration platforms, and complex event processing. Advantages include modularity, testability, scalability, and easier reasoning about data provenance. Challenges include a steeper learning curve, tooling fragmentation, and debugging complexity in large graphs.

See also: Flow-based programming, dataflow, event-driven architecture, and stream processing.