FD.js and NoFlo

[bergie]

This isn't really a bug report, more of a heads-up :-)

With component #2 and Node.js #3 packaging, it was quite easy to wrap FD.js into a set of NoFlo components: https://github.com/noflo/noflo-finitedomain

While we still need to expose a bit more of the APIs as components, this already allows visual experimentation with finite domain constrain solving:

[srikumarks]

(This is a personal opinion and I haven't used NoFlo yet.)

I'm unsure what advantage such a graphical visualization of the constraint script provides over plain code. On the other hand, checkout the Search Tree Visualization project which helps you explore the search space visually ... which imho is way more useful to explore a problem.

[bergie]

@srikumarks yeah, I agree that a flow graph isn't the optimal way to visualize solver state (though you could reuse the graph format to show the search tree). However, the good thing here is making FD.js (and constraint solving in general) part of the larger Flowhub toolset.