[Blobs] Introduction

[Malcolm Wallace]

Welcome to the mailing list for the Blobs diagram editor.

I'm hoping that some new members will tell us about their interest in
Blobs - in what applications do you forsee using it?  What
application-specific needs do you think you will want to layer on top of
the basic editor?

Maybe this will provoke some thoughts about how best to design the
interfaces between the editor and user-code, to promote greater
generality and re-usability.

Arjan and Martijn have already presented (on the web etc) a lot of
information about their Dazzle tool, from which Blobs was born.

For myself, I have developed a theoretical framework called the "Failure
Propagation and Transformation Calculus", used for analysing the safety
of systems architectures.  Nodes represent hardware/software components
and communications protocols, whilst edges represent error flows between
them (currently based on dataflow and control flow).  The user annotates
each component with an expression denoting its ability to fail, and its
response to incoming failures.  The calculus then determines the maximal
set of failures that can flow through any edge of the diagram.

My analysis routine takes an input graph, and returns the same graph,
but with every edge annotated with some new information, which is simply
passed back into Blobs for visualisation.

However, I can certainly imagine that other people will want to do more
complex operations on graphs.  Let's hear about them!

Regards,
    Malcolm