Using the node editor in a private project Developer question: Is it possible to grab the Node editor (i.e. the one used for compositing) and define my own elements for a totally different project?
I'm just looking for the nifty graphics and interface, and wish to program the functionality myself.

I tried googling to no avail.
While it isn't documented much, blender does support custom node trees. You can start with the custom nodetree template in blenders text editor. You may also find some help searching here for pynode.

Two example projects using custom node trees are animation nodes and sverchok.

As you are defining each nodes functionality, you don't have to access or modify blenders data, so you could use blenders node editor while making each node read/write data to files.