Common terms in the flow-based world and their explanation. Below each paragraph represents a term. First it is given in bold as proposed by Morrison's book (if available), other versions are given in braces. Each term should be decided after a discussion, please post your comments below. Then besides a short description a detailed article can be added for each term or group of terms.
Capacity - max. number of information packets that can be buffered within a connection at a time.
Component (same in Component-based systems; auton - Aristophanes, class - OOP, processor - DSP) - a black box processing data, a most common building block in FBP.
Connection (pipe - POSIX pipes, Hartmann pipeline, buffer - Protocol Buffers; channel - CSP, Go; line - DSP) - connection between components through which data flows.
Epoch (tact, tick - DSP) - elementary unit of system lifetime.
Information packet (same in OSI/ISO; message - OOP, Protocol Buffers; record - RDMBS; tuple - Linda) - unit of data flow exchanged across components.
Initial information packet (also parameter; control input - IDEF0) - special type of data which modifies external parameters of the process functioning.
Looper - resident process.
Nest (term by Aristophanes; island, section - Ohua) - a part of the flow graph with intensive internal communication which is attached to the same OS thread/process for high efficiency and may have its own scheduler.
Net (graph) - structural representation of an application as a network of components and connections between them.
Non-looper - a non-resident process which quits right after performing its task.
Port (same in Component-based systems, DSP, Berkley sockets; channel - CSP, Go) - a connection point in a component through which it sends or receives data.
Process (object - OOP; coroutine - CSP) - an instance of a component being executed in runtime. Each component may spawn one or several processes.
Stream (signal - DSP) - a sequence of information packets transmitted from one component to another.
Subnet - a part of a net being a net itself.
Substream (also composite component) - a stream nested within another (parent) stream.
Thread - operating system parallel execution primitive with shared memory.
I personally dislike these 2 terms used in JPM's book. They sound like very uncommon slang. I suggest using "Persistent process" and "Non-persistent process" instead. Does anybody have a better suggestion?
a looper is "stateful" (even if just its program counter)
a non-looper is "stateless" (although can have "external state" in the form of an IP sent to itself)
A looper can actually be stateless, it's not a requirement for loopers to have state if you don't mean the function itself to be its state. Here is something more precise from the world of processes: loopers are "resident" and non-loopers are "non-resident".