I strongly believe that visual programming can help software development in many ways. “a picture says more then a 1000 words”… especially if it’s interactive. Thats why it’s very important that a visual programming needs to embeddable in exisiting code bases and not be a silo. That’s what I am focussing on and want to show in this talk.

The visual programming system that I am developing has a generic embeddable core that can be used to develop multiple visual programming languages in a live infinite canvas web environment. The execution engine is separated from the core so that different execution engines can be implemented and deployed with an application (even using different technologies then the visual programming design core itself, which is javascript/web). The results can be viewed and debugged live. How the results look and can be debugged, depend on the targetted application behavior.

In the current demo setups (see here at https://codeflowcanvas.io) there’s a webgl shader and a web-client-app flow. In the web-client-app flow the debugging is done using a timeline slider which can be used to view all of the steps that the program executed including its state. In the webgl pixel shader the result is updated live and the timeline slider is used to scrub through the generated shaders when creating/modifying a visual flow.

Some nice features include: - generic node composition - replacing nodes with compatible nodes and seeing the impact of the change directly - insert compatible nodes into connections