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Absolute full agreement. Repeating my comment from yesterday's forgotten submission¹:

Pipes was the only example of the "no/low code" idea that ever made me believe that possible future was remotely feasible. I saw a fair few co-workers produce some really interesting things with Pipes, and many wouldn't have known where to begin if you sat them down in front of a Python prompt with lxml. Seeing them chain filters, mangle date formats and input types was really cool.

The screenshots in the linked article make me hope that similar tooling can rise again.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26529364

1 comments

The nice thing about Pipes was (and still is!) that also if you know how to program the same task as script, having it in a flow based UI and using the pre-made blocks really makes these kind of web information retrieval tasks easier. On top of that not having to worry about how to run the pipe or script regularly on a server is nice, though the article here with the self-hostable solution had that hurdle again.

You can get Node-RED to run on PaaS services (I have other repos that deploy it to Azure App Service, for instance, which is "equivalent" to Beanstalk).

The thing about that (for me) is that Node-RED itself (and most of its modules) assume their execution context is a regular machine, so what it really likes is a normal filesystem.

But it does have a number of ways to schedule flows internally, so it's a pretty much all-in-one solution from the moment you get it going.

I saw that in your article a bit :) But Yahoo Pipes for me was about relatively effortless web infrastructure for me. A self-hosted solution would only be close enough to that if it was a one-click heroku image probably, and even then that would be problematic, since my account uses their free plan already for something else. That's a big part of why I went the SaaS route with my Pipes adaption and added self-hostability only later.