Nodes and Connections

Not sure when to use what? Here are a few quick guidelines to help you choose:

Node Palette

	Person Customers or stakeholders	You want to model people's actions, permissions, or decision points.	A person logging into an admin dashboard, approving a workflow, or sending a secure message.
	Entity Business entities or AIs	You need access for AI agents, companies, tenants, departments, identity domains.	A healthcare provider, an insurance company, or a tenant account applying its own access rules.
	Thing Physical or digital objects/devices	You’re modelling hardware, IoT devices, sensors, servers, or edge components.	A smart meter sending readings, a kiosk receiving updates, or a server reporting health status.
	Process Business processes or Agentic workflows	You want to show business logic, transformations, or background tasks.	A data validation step, a policy enforcement engine, or a message-routing workflow.
	API External systems or platform integrations	You’re integrating with third-party services or exposing functionality programmatically.	A payment processor API, mapping service, or internal microservice endpoint.
	Other Custom node type for anything else	You need to include concepts like storage, policies, models, or abstract systems.	A policy store, encryption module, AI model, or logging system.

Connection Types

If you are unsure, you can use Data Stream.

Async Comms	Asynchronous, non-blocking communication where the sender does not wait for a response and the receiver does not need to be online. Uses Get/Put semantics. Read more here.	Really handy if you cannot guarantee both the sender/ receiver will be online at the same time.	A device uploads data that is processed later, or a message is delivered when the recipient comes online.
Sync Comms	Synchronous communication where the sender waits for an immediate response. Uses Notification (Read more here) semantics and/or Get/Put (Read more here) semantics.	You need real-time interaction or confirmation.	A user request that must return a result immediately, like fetching account details.
Notifications	One-way signals used to alert or inform. Uses Notification semantics Read more here.	You need to notify without requiring a response.	Push notifications, system alerts, or status updates sent to users or services.
RPC	Structured request/response interactions between systems. Ideal for complex operations where the other party may not be online at the time of execution (especially useful for policy-driven workflows). Supported in the SDK semantics. Read more here.	You want function-like calls across services with clear inputs and outputs.	Calling a billing service to calculate charges or a policy engine to validate access.
Data Stream	Ideal for long-running processes (such as LLM generation) where completion time is uncertain and results may need to stream incrementally. Uses the stream (Read more here) semantics or notifications (Read more here) semantics.	You’re handling live, ongoing data rather than discrete messages	Telemetry feeds, sensor data, logs, or real-time analytics pipelines.
TCP	Low-level, persistent network connections that enable lower latency communication (e.g., NoPorts SSH, MCP servers). Uses Noports_Core (Read more here) semantics.	You need a fast end-to-end encrypted TCP connection with raw network speed.	A custom protocol, legacy integration, or long-lived secure connection.