Tuesday, March 6th, 2007
Lily: Graphical data-flow programming environment
Bill Orcutt has been working on Lily, a graphical data-flow programming environment that runs in a web browser:
Programs are built graphically by connecting modules to add functionality, fetch and direct
the flow of data, play sound or video, add interactivity or display results. Lily programs can be shared with other Lily users, installed as Firefox add-ons, run as standalone apps using XULrunner, or (with some limitations) be embedded in a web page.
Or, as Bill told us:
It’s sort of a client-side version of Yahoo’s Pipes written in Javascript. I’ve been working on it since July and it’s fairly far along- there’s over 150 modules available wrapping web apis, various UI widgets (both browser native and from the various JS libraries- YUI, Scriptaculous, JQuery, etc), privileged access to Storage, the file system & sockets, SVG graphics & Multimedia. There’s also an SDK available and its very simple and straightforward to develop new modules in JS. Programs developed in Lily can be shared with other users (the programs
themselves are saved as .json files) or exported as FF add-ons, standalone Xulrunner apps or simply as js/html that can be displayed in a web page.
Check out the demo screencasts to get a feel for it. There is some pretty amazing stuff here. I liked Pipes, but wanted to be able to create my own modules. With Lily you can create your own modules in simple JavaScript!
- Simple addition
- A beatbox
- Circle Animation Fun
- Animation Following
- A HTTPD server. Really
- NYTimes via Flickr
- Flickr YUI Lightbox
- Working with Text
Wow really cool and promising app :)
Will it be free or something ? When can we have a open beta ? I want to participate !! :)
Good luck !
Yep, for now they have realy cool beta :)
Looking forward…
This reminds me of another video I saw the other day of a client-side mashup development / dataflow remixing app called AlchemyPoint. The stuff from Kapow also looks pretty cool. Seems there’s a lot of neat stuff going on in this arena! Anyone know when Lily will be available to the public?
nice. i always wanted Max/MSP in my browser :P
Wow that is just totally badass… the underlying code is what? I see JSON mentioned but I doubt its JS right?
This looks like a LabView by National Instruments. Its promising!
This has real potential for non-programmers to create mashups. Keep us posted!