Remember that Go vs D MQTT thing and how we wondered about dmd vs gdc?

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2014-03-08 at 08:53 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 3/8/14, 3:22 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> > Dataflow is though where "Big Data" is going. There are commercial
> > offerings in the JVM space and they are making huge profits on
> > licencing, simply because the frameworks work.
> 
> Do you have a couple of relevant links describing dataflow?

First and foremost we have to distinguish dataflow software
architectures from dataflow computers. The latter were an alternate
hardware architecture that failed to gain traction, but there is an
awful lot of literature out there on it. So just searching the Web is
likely to give an lot of that especially in the period 1980 to 1995.

The dataflow software architectures are modelled directly on the
structural concepts of dataflow hardware and so the terminology is
exactly the same. However whereas an operator in hardware mean add,
multiply, etc. in a software architecture it just means some sequential
computation that requires certain inputs and delivers some outputs. The
computation must be a process, so effectively a function with no free
variables.

The GPars version of this is at:

http://gpars.codehaus.org/Dataflow
http://gpars.org/guide/guide/dataflow.html

GPars needs some more work, but I haven't had chance to focus on it
recently.

This introduces all the cute jargon:

http://www.cs.colostate.edu/cameron/dataflow.html

Wikipedia has this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming

but it is clearly in need of some sub-editing.

Hopefully this does as a start. I can try hunt up some other things if
that would help.

The commercial offering I know something of is called DataRush, it's a
product from a subgroup in the Pervasive group for the JVM (and
optionally Hadoop):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataRush_Technology

I played with this in 2008 before it was formally released, and on and
off since. GPars dataflow should compete with this but they are a
company with resources, and GPars has two fairly non-active (due to work
commitments) volunteer developers. We had been hoping the fact that
GPars is core Groovy technology required for Grails and allt he other
Gr8 technology, that people would step up. However the very concept of a
concurrency and parallelism framework seems to frighten off even some of
the best programmers.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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