How to Wire Up a Fabrik Application

The word fabrik, from the Latin verb fabricare, means to fabricate. It became a German and later an English word to describe places where manufacturing takes place, such as factories. Similarly, Fabrik is a visual programming integrated development environment that provides a kit of computational and user interface components that can be "wired" together to construct new library components and complete applications.

Application construction in Fabrik is extremely simple and immediate. An author defines an application by directly manipulating its visual representation, selecting appropriate Fabrik components from the library and connecting them up in order to achieve the desired functionality and appearance. A Fabrik component appears as a rectangular grapheme with one or more connectors, called pins, located around its periphery. Some of the pins channel input, others channel output and still others (bidirectional pins) are able to pass data in either direction.

Bidirectionality is an essential feature of Fabrik that makes it possible to build up complex synthetic graphics and other generative structures. For example, the slider component of figure 2a consists of a tall slender grapheme generated by the rectangle creator grapheme with input points 15@0 and 22@118 in its upper-left and lower-right corners and a small number component that displays the current value. Flowing through the slider is an external gateway, NumToPoint, which converts the integer value to a point, Default and ConstrainPoint, each of which constrains the slider's position to the top or bottom edge of its framed image.