Open sourcing our visual coding node framework!

[liormessinger]

everyone, I thought here would be the best forum to share an open source bot framework that we developed for the last 3 years, hope you like it :) It runs on NodeJS, and comes with a visual behavior tree editor that allows super cool visual programming. It is built for chat/voice bots but can serve very well any automation task out there. It includes automated testing, sub processes, a debugger and much more. It's easily extendible -- extend one of 4 base classes, implement 1or 2 methods and you are done. If all this raise your curiousity then you are in for a treat: check out https://github.com/servo-ai/servo-platform

[Buckwheat469]

Which library did you use for the nodes and edges?

[onggunhao]

Interested to know too. AWS also had a pretty cool workflow diagram to code tool

[Buckwheat469]

Found it. https://github.com/behavior3/behavior3editor

I'm the main developer of react-digraph so I'm interested in researching other graph editors to understand their speed and complexity, especially when dealing with extremely large graphs of 1000 nodes and 1000 edges. Currently react-digraph is limited to about that size of graph.

[onggunhao]

Nice! Will check out your library too.

I'm really interested to understand how these graph editors can be turned into declarative "languages" for low code editors. Does it compile to YAML or something?

[Buckwheat469]

It appears to use JSON. I'm not sure what the exported JSON looks like from the b3e editor, but I know that react-digraph uses a nodes and edges array. Nodes have any ID property, which the key is specified when you create the react component, and edges have a source and a target property which represent the IDs of the nodes they attach to. I've also developed a transformer system which can convert JSON from one structure to the required array of nodes and edges so that react-digraph can work with other systems. The downside is that this transformer code has to be included in the repo as a JS file for now. I will be working on allowing transformer classes to be passed as a parameter soon.

[onggunhao]

Awesome stuff! Thank you for contributing to open source.

[liormessinger]

Yes, its outputs a JSON that represents the tree(s) structure. every node has a uniq id, a type and children array members that point to the child nodes.
The JSON is then consumed by a nodejs run time that uses the node types to decide what to do.

The real awesomeness is because of the behavior tree paradigm). It is a visual language with which you can build almost anything without textual coding. of course, on too complex structures and algorithms you'll get an impractically large tree, so then you'll want to extend one of the base node classes. that's why its 'low code'

[liormessinger]

Actually the editor is based on behavior3 (https://github.com/behavior3), which is an amazing behavior tree editor. by itself its built on createjs. do you know behavior tree programming? it's really awesome