Node-RED 3.0 Released

Node-RED is a programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways.

It provides a browser-based editor that makes it easy to wire together flows using the wide range of nodes in the palette that can be deployed to its runtime in a single-click. If nodes and wires is "the way" what's missing in node RED for the paradigm to get wider adoption? 🎥 📰 Release Notes

I think it's focused on IOT/backend solutions.. as far as I know you can't build pure frontend solutions with it. I've worked with node-red in the past (5 years ago) and it was a big inspiration for myself to start experimenting with Node-and-wire interfaces

The success of ifttt and zapier shows this paradigm has wide reach. The holdup for node red is the positioning & getting started options. They are developer focused, these platforms do better with the non-technical crowd. For developers, most of the time we only need a few specific components at a time, so why adopt a platform that we need to call out to, maintain, etc... when we can just call some functions in our current program, which by the way is sharable if the interface is designed well.

This thread got me thinking about why I don’t like node-red, and, to veer off down multiple ratholes... Node and wire is one of “the way”s. As a DPL (diagrammatic programming language) node-red leaves something to be desired. Programming languages are IDEs for the task of programming machines. Consider notations from other more mature disciplines, e.g. 1. electronics schematics 2. construction blueprints 3. music scores. 1 is non-textual, and, node-and-wire. 2 is non-textual, and, diagrammatic 3 is non-textual, and, time-varying, and, hard real-time, and, teachable to 5-year olds. A technical diagram is a strict subset of more general visual art, like programming languages are a strict subset of more general prose. What jumps out at me as node-red’s first-order deficiency is ... https://publish.obsidian.md/programmingsimplicity/2022-07-17-Notation+Suitability

The guy I am livestreaming in AgTech has specifically churned on node-red to adopt webcode because it's too hard to produce state-of-the-art visualizations. If you are trying to build user facing iot solutions it causes more work than it solves (in his words). Node and wires is not useful for creating custom UIs (or it's not a focus in any tool yet). Link to iot integration livestream which would be where you would expect node-red to shine but webcode is actually better because of integrated debugger https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/blueswireless-2022-06-14