It is a short description of the idea behind the Octopus Elixir library I’ve recently created. It is the necessary part of the more ambitious idea of scaling the Flow-based programming approach defined in the ALF framework to the system level. …

When I started promoting my new project ALF (Application Layer Framework), I realized that many people are a bit confused with what the “application layer” is and why we need a framework for that. I can understand this confusion. Many of my friends and colleagues use Ruby and Elixir as…

TL;DR. Go directly to the ALF page. FBP and Actors Flow-based Programming is a quite old idea (early 70th) of presenting an application as a network of independent processes (components) exchanging data via message passing. It’s like the well-known Actor model, but with a couple of significant differences. First, connections between processes (which…

My previous article was about additional complexity that appears when one splits a monolithic system into parts. The basic idea is that, regardless of the underlying communication infrastructure, the SOA system has an additional “communication complexity” which is basically the extra knowledge about the interfaces of the services. If, for…

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a common way to “decrease” the complexity of the software system by splitting it into several parts. I put “decrease” into quotes because actually the complexity always increases. Splitting the system into separate well-defined components is a logical extension of the splitting system’s functionality into…

Elixir/Erlang OTP abstractions enforce developers to split programs into independent parts. While “gen_servers” encapsulate parts of business logic on micro-level, “applications” present a more general (“service”) part of the system. Complex programs written in Elixir are always a collection of communicating OTP applications. The main question appeared while developing such…

Flowex is Flow-Based Programming framework built on top of Elixir GenStage library. It is a set of abstractions which allows writing program with Railway FBP paradigm. You can read more about Flowex in this post. I’ve written a couple of posts about the library and had a few of talks…

When your application grows it’s a good solution to split it into separate microservices to handle the complexity. When you decide to extract some functionality into separate service(s) two problems appear: How to organize communication between main application and service(s) in the way you don’t need to make lots of…

In Flow-Based Programming (FBP) paradigm each component is an independent process — “black box”. Component only transforms input to output, and this transformation is independent of internal implementation. So in general components can be written in different languages and then linked together in a single network. Ability to run alias…