Node RED VS ecs-faq

Good question.

I expect that we're moving into a phase of AIs talking to AIs, and initially it'll be wasteful (because it'll be mostly English), but eventually, they'll derive their own language and seamlessly upgrade protocols when they determine they're talking to an AI. No clue how that will come about or what that language will look like, but honestly, it's kind of exciting.

Really interesting to think about how they might handle context, as well. Even though we have much bigger context windows (and they'll only get larger), context management is still a resource-management issue, which we'll probably continue to refine, as well. Imagine different strategies for managing both what is brought into the context of each request, as well as what form it could take (level of detail, additional references or commentary on it, etc). Things could get really unreadable even in English, and still be very interpretable for an LLM.

W.r.t. the graph-oriented interfaces, are you thinking something like Node-RED [1]? I'm seeing more and more people mention having LLMs produce non-text or structured outputs, like JSON, UI, and other things. Easy to imagine an LLM that wires together various open-source platforms, on-demand. Something like Node-RED for pipelines/functions, some UI tools for visualization/interactivity, other platforms for messaging, etc...

[1] https://nodered.org/

I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article.

The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time.

That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't.

- n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/

- Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in this thread)

- trigger dev: trigger.dev

- automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/

- Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introducti...

- Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

- budibase: https://budibase.com/

- windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/

- tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows

- Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce <-> PostgreSQL)

- Zapier: zapier.com/

Anyway I hope some of these are fun!

Source: https://github.com/node-red/node-red

I believe Node-RED (https://nodered.org/) the way to go. It's just an NPM package to install and you can run it how ever you wish (even on Windows). It has a friendly and helpful community with even the main developers tirelessly answering even beginner level questions. In fact the community forum its THE friendliest forum I've ever been a member of by a large margin. Node-RED's development is supported by the JS Foundation and it's completely free and open source. It's widely used in the industrial automation industry and even integrated by some PLC manufacturers such as Siemens.

Does anyone know if their are plans to implement something like this (or if there are already custom nodes out there). I'd like to experiment with things like looping and incrementing values (like a for loop) for a Ksampler for example. It's only an example though, so I am not looking for a ksampler specific solution; just a generic way to have a variable (e.g. Seed value), run some nodes that use that value, increment the value, and then loop back to the beginning until some sort of condition is met. Node-Red (an event driven node based programming language) has this functionality so it could defintely work in a node based environment such as ComfyUI (see here).

The Wikipedia article provides a broad overview, while this FAQ offers a more systematic exploration: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq

Sparsey is an Entity Component System focused on flexibility, conciseness and providing features exclusive to its sparse set-based implementation.

For further reading, here is a great article about these different approaches within Rust specifically: https://csherratt.github.io/blog/posts/specs-and-legion/ and here is a great general resource for commonly-used terms and techniques in ECS development: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq

Godot has a node based system (nodes can have child nodes linked to them, and there are different types of nodes for the type of functionality they represent). Another alternative could be a more OOP approach (utilising inheritance as the main means of extending functionality), not aware of any modern engines that take this approach anymore. It’s also worth noting that ECS implementations can differ wildly, this faq from the flecs creator has a good rundown on what some of different variants are.

You might wanna take a look at https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq, it lays this all out better than I can.

To find more about ECS, see the FAQ: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq/blob/master/README.md

Using the relational model for app data in memory is really interesting.

Martin Fowler wrote about doing that as a way to get around the "object-relational mismatch" issue[1]. Richard Fabian describes "data-oriented design" as having a lot of overlap with the relational model[2]. ECSes becoming very popular in game engines are basically in-memory relational databases where "components" are "tables"[3].

[1]: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/OrmHate.html

[2]: https://dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/

[3]: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq#what-is-ecs

This is the ECS FAQ I'm currently using.

While Unity's DOTS/ECS is positioned as solving performance issues for large numbers of objects, there are a number of other advantages. See https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq for a more in-depth look. IMHO the reusability and extensibility ECS encourages is as valuable as any performance increase. Compared to the GameObject style, which encourages random state mutations and side-effects, ECS enforces a more functional style, which results in code that is easier to reason about and test.

thanks, i think a little more background on the ECS world will help you get the context, this is from the author of Flecs: https://github.com/SanderMertens/ecs-faq