[HN Gopher] Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes
___________________________________________________________________
Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes
Author : type0
Score : 345 points
Date : 2023-12-15 04:07 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retool.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retool.com)
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I used Pipes to get a feed of specific categories of used video
| games and game systems from Craigslist in college and beyond. I
| got a lot of stuff that way, and visited many parts of the cities
| I lived in that I otherwise wouldn't have.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| For resale or collection? I used to hit up our local vintage
| store (next to my high school) and pick up all the donated NESs
| and games to resell on eBay (probably back to the people who's
| parents donated that old useless junk...)
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Collection. I just loved having a physical library of good-
| condition boxed games from the era of my childhood.
| djoshea wrote:
| I used pipes back in college to randomize our roommate ordering
| in picking dorm rooms. I had it take the top headline on The NY
| Times website, hash it, and pull out numbers from 1-6 in a
| deterministic way. It was the best way I could think of to do it
| from afar over the summer, and convince everyone it was fair
| without needing to run code ourselves. It was useful and fun to
| use!
| hackhunter wrote:
| Is it still useful today? I skipped the rss time.
| cja wrote:
| RSS is how I read websites. It's still RSS time
| Aloha wrote:
| With the unwinding of twitter, RSS has become invaluable to
| me as a replacement.
| edpichler wrote:
| Very much. It saves you a lot of time.
| psadri wrote:
| Kudos to the retool design team and Glenn on a really nice
| execution of this story. The Pipes inspired illustrations are
| gold.
| solardev wrote:
| Does it work smoothly for you? It's so laggy on my phone I
| can't even read the first post it
| iamthejuan wrote:
| Works fine on Poco F3.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I wouldn't call it smooth, but certainly servicable on my
| Firefox for Android, Samsung S21.
| edpichler wrote:
| Here (Win 11 and Brave) it is very smooth but it seems many
| people are complaining.
| glennfle wrote:
| Thank you for your time and patience with this! I am so glad
| that one of my favorite services ever now has its story told.
| aworks wrote:
| Just this week, I was thinking if I could recreate my use of
| Pipes...
|
| From each track in the RSS feed of tracks scrobbled on last.fm,
| do a google search and pipe the output back to an RSS feed into
| my reader.
|
| Neither chatGPT nor Google could make sense of my request. Any
| ideas?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I'd fire-up Linqpad, load-in a NuGet package for RSS feed
| parsing, then do something like `SomeRssLib.LoadFrom(
| "https://last.fm/yourfeed.rss" ).Select( async e =>
| httpClient.GetAsync( "https://google.com/search?q=" +
| Uri.EscapeDataString( e["track_title"] ) ) ).StringJoin(
| resultHtml => "some quick-and-dirty-XML-string-concat-here"
| ).SomePostfixApplyExt( result => File.WriteAllText(
| "output.rss", result )`.
|
| ...something like that?
| viraptor wrote:
| If you need only that, it may be easiest to write a few lines
| of python/js and run it yourself or through some serverless
| offering. If you have more workflows to do, n8n.io may be
| useful.
| m-a-r-c-e-l wrote:
| Yahoo Pipes was the spiritual father of Node RED
| vincnetas wrote:
| :) Reminded me that i still have node red spinning on my home
| server handling automations. Without any upgrades for...
| forever
|
| Integrating IKEA five button remote with Sonos speaker.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Pipes was awesome for sure. It fit so nicely into a golden web
| 2.0 era sort of period where there was still loose open
| interoperability thanks to prevalent RSS and similar tech.
| Effective at cobbling together simple things to make simply
| useful things.
|
| What's with this epic design and work put into this deep dive
| tho? What an effort from Retool. Suppose maybe just wondering why
| they didn't do it earlier! Ha
| underbluewaters wrote:
| Web 2.0 times were great. It was just taken as a given that the
| future was open standards, interoperable web services, and
| creative tools like Pipes that let users and developers easily
| leverage them. Social media and the drive to monetize users at
| all costs destroyed that potential.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know why this hasn't become a thing. There seems
| to be so much "Latent value" locked up in the semistructured
| data (in HTML format but not in machine readable format) that
| could be unlocked via crowdsourcing with the right tool. That's
| what I want to build. I just think there's so much value in
| harnessing that. The interoperability you can enable of
| bringing data out of silos, and mashing up actions and values
| from different contexts...I mean, we _need_ existing web
| content to be part of web authoring in a first class way.
| chrisallick wrote:
| wow. what a great mobile read xp to match a great story. reminds
| of reading "in the beginning was the command line."
| ftigis wrote:
| Not great for me. Getting single digit fps/absymal scroll
| performance here on my M1 Pro MBP and iPhone.
| chrisallick wrote:
| bummer. flawless on my iphone. go into reader mode, its still
| a great read.
| lrx wrote:
| Yeah, something is wrong with your setup.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Pixel Pro 7, also 2 fps in both Chrome and Firefox. I don't
| think it's a "just them" thing I think it's just not
| working well for many people.
| solardev wrote:
| Same here, totally unusable on Pixel 7
| Klonoar wrote:
| Weird, worked totally fine on my M1 Pro MBP.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I was just telling someone about this. Good old days.
| zeristor wrote:
| It took me a while to realise that AWS Steps is like Yahoo Pipes.
|
| It isn't as simple, and there aren't as many clickable
| components, but it was weird that I was so slow to realise it.
|
| I guess someone with more insight can point out where I'm wrong.
| big_paps wrote:
| Never heard of it. Will try this out.
| big_paps wrote:
| I used this service quite a bit in combination with drupal 5,
| shortly before it shut down. So 1.5 decades ago you could build
| quite large systems just by clicking stuff together.
| padolsey wrote:
| I miss Yahoo Pipes so much. And YQL. In 2009 I implemented an
| effectively cross-domain XHR (ajax) plugin on top of jQuery so I
| could grab random webpages on the client-side and query them via
| CSS selectors (converted to XPath). YQL would give me JSONP back
| so it all felt quite magical. Ah the old days...
| Guillaume86 wrote:
| Yes pipes could be used as a CORS proxy, I built a full Spotify
| like app client side with jquery at the time,
| searching/streaming mp3s at radioblogclub and VK.com and
| fetching metadata/similar recommendations from last.fm etc...
| pests wrote:
| Ah man, the open web we were promised. I miss these days of
| mashing up multiple services and just the general free for
| all. Can't do anything without an API key these days.
| keepamovin wrote:
| I too share dreams of that open web and want to re-create
| it. The first JS book I saw was the classic DHTML book with
| an attractive cover (can't find it now) in 2002 at
| Kinokuniya in Sydney. Good times.
|
| i'm building a dev API on top of
| https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox that should
| provide the same functionality as a CORS-proxy /
| unrestricted iframe to be able to embed and interact with
| content across origins.
| pests wrote:
| Ha, I bet we're similar age. I haven't heard the term
| DHTML in so long. Hows AJAX holding up these days? Then
| long polling aka Comet? Thankfully we've always embraced
| puns in tech.
| apitman wrote:
| Turns running free services is expensive with often little
| reward. And since essentially the only way to do
| micropayments currently is with ads, any platform that
| can't effectively deliver ads essential can't survive.
| Until users are willing to pay for web services, and
| provided an easy way to do so, there are a lot of cool
| things that will remain unsustainable.
| Guillaume86 wrote:
| Yes pipes could be used as a CORS proxy, I built a full Spotify
| like app client side with jquery at the time,
| searching/streaming mp3s at radioblogclub and VK.com and
| fetching metadata/similar recommendations from last.fm etc...
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Try out Node-RED[0] it provides all the same functionality of
| Ypipes plus much more. And the best is, it uses jQuery for the
| Ui!
|
| It's pitched as being for Iot but it's incredibly flexible that
| you can do anything with it.
|
| [0]=https://nodered.org
| Towaway69 wrote:
| If you want to get a taste of the Node-RED interface, no
| server provided so flow execution is not possible,then
| checkout https://deadred.flowhub.org
|
| Alternatively, check out the source code at
| https://github.com/gorenje/cdn.flowhub.org and run it locally
| or somewhere else.
|
| There are SaaS offerings for Node-RED or you can install it
| yourself but there isn't a one-click-Node-RED experience but
| https://deadred.flowhub.org provides that by being a
| serverless, static frontend-only version.
| solardev wrote:
| That is the laggiest animation I've ever seen :( Totally unusable
| (Chrome on Android, Pixel 7). Is there a text version?
| happymellon wrote:
| I wondered whether my page had crashed.
|
| I couldn't get anything to work.
| shadycuz wrote:
| Interesting, worked fine for me. Also using chrome on Pixel 7.
| blueboo wrote:
| Laggily zooms a bit...then breaks on iOS becoming a big
| scrollable white page. I bet when it works the animation is
| kind of neat.
|
| So much work to bounce your readers, pity!
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Could be because the Pixel 7 GPU is quite weak even though it's
| not an alle phone so heavy Websites can bring it to its knees.
| xattt wrote:
| A text story should not bring a phone to its knees.
| solardev wrote:
| What's an alle phone?
|
| I've never seen the phone lag on any other website. Hell, my
| Pixel 1 or Nexus phones didn't have issues either. I've never
| seen lag like this on any website, period... I don't think
| it's a GPU thing. Probably there is some condition that makes
| it really laggy on some devices and not others. Hmm.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| This is also totally unusable for me on Chrome on M1 Pro.
|
| It makes all Chrome windows unusable, when the tab with this
| page is displayed.
| RickHull wrote:
| Totally unusable on iPhone 14 Pro.
| itishappy wrote:
| The page runs quite smooth once you get past the title to the
| actual text.
|
| (Chrome on Android, Pixel 7)
| whalesalad wrote:
| I'm on a 13900K with an RX 6600 and it is barely usable for me
| as well. Firefox tho... just tested in Chrome and it is better
| after the initial scroll but that first move is a killer.
| soylentcola wrote:
| Yeah, Firefox on my office desktop (10-core i9 with 16GB RAM.
| Crap GPU though) was unresponsive for a good 30 seconds
| before I was able to close the tab. Worried for a sec that
| I'd have to force close the browser.
| hotgiraffe wrote:
| it's not even about slowness, I just can't read more than a
| single paragraph with those intrusive animations. vertigo sets
| in immediately...
| mrlambchop wrote:
| Completely unusable on M3 Pro @ 64GB! Safari latest Mac OS
| apitman wrote:
| Already mentioned above before I saw this comment but I'll pile
| on. Firefox on Linux workstation is really bad. Chromium much
| better but the scrolljacking is still really bad
| solardev wrote:
| These days there's stuff like Make.com (formerly Integromat),
| IFTTT, Zapier, etc. to do some low code piping. Airtable also got
| automation and pipeline support.
|
| Still miss Pipes though. It was awesome!
| onli wrote:
| When Pipes died I saw all the comments and wondered why no one
| built a successor project. When after a few years that still
| hadn't happened, and after an idea on how to get it to work had
| popped into my head, I built it myself: https://github.com/pipes-
| digital/pipes is the source code and https://www.pipes.digital/ a
| hosted version.
|
| To call it a successor project is maybe arrogant and misleading -
| it can not do half of what the Yahoo project did, and is sorely
| missing time and work from my side to make it into what it should
| be. But if you are nostalgic for the concept and especially if
| you just want to filter or combine a few RSS feeds, or create one
| for a HTML page that is missing one, it's worth a try I still
| think. I personally use it regularly to get specific YouTube
| videos from a few channels that have many other videos I do not
| care about.
|
| The article mentions one of the big problems for this kind of
| project: The APIs are missing or not open anymore. For example, a
| comment here mentions doing a google search for a song title and
| putting this in a feed - but you can't realistically parse
| Google. So you have to use the API, which I didn't know existed
| until looking it up now, and calculate the price tag attached to
| it very carefully. Maybe it would be a realistic integration to
| provide with a different search engine. Or a bigger project
| should run of the local search engines for the pipes block.
|
| The article is also right in that there is a lot of influence of
| Pipes in different projects. I was always wondering why that
| influence was often so little - to react to output on a page in a
| wizard for example, instead of having blocks. I think I
| understand that a little bit better now - it is really a strange
| abstraction level. You are working with a flow of structured
| data, without necessarily having the correct data structure for
| that, and then that needs to be transformed somehow. The idea
| that you might have JSON on a page somewhere you want to extract
| and manipulate, but then that data is inside of your outer feed
| format - it feels wrong to confront the user with these details,
| it makes sure the target groups is developers, but it also does
| not seem like something that can be reasonably universally
| solved. But maybe I'm wrong here, and this is more a problem with
| my implementation (where RSS is piped from block to block) than
| with the concept itself.
|
| The idea of a real Pipes 2 is very exciting to me though. Give it
| some initial funding, built all of the modern APIs into it that
| can be added (and in doubt just give users the option to use
| their own API keys) - especially things like ChatGPT, after all
| those LLMs are great in converting structured data - solve the
| data format question and crucially keep the interface block based
| (but maybe built with something like Flutter, so it can be
| better). Could work, not to win the world, but as something that
| can justify its existence next to ifttt and zapier. At least I
| regularly get the impression that the concept still fascinates
| people a lot, though their specific use case is very often very
| specialized and then often enough not something my small pipes
| project can cover. But if it were broader...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _it feels wrong to confront the user with these details, it
| makes sure the target groups is developers_
|
| That is, IMHO, not a real problem at all. Definitely not what
| people make it to be.
|
| Developers aren't alien species. They aren't a special class of
| people, bred and trained to commune with the machine. In
| general, anyone could in theory become one. For this particular
| case - anyone can _easily_ become one: that is, through search
| and thinking figure out enough to use Pipes-like software to
| solve some need, improve their lives a bit.
|
| Software like this is within the range of tips&tricks people
| exchange on-line, or from their friends. Idiosyncratic, Ad-hoc,
| low complexity, high-value. The random non-tech person who's
| e.g. carefully curating a Google Sheet of board games they play
| with friends, is driven and able enough to add some Pipes-like
| automation to it. They've picked up how to do conditional
| formatting and link images from a tutorial, they can pick up
| how to Pipes-in ratings out of BGG or something just as well.
|
| Point being: total domination isn't the only measure of
| success. Will a Pipes-like product be usable for _absolutely
| everyone_? Not at all. But people with a need and minimum
| ability to use a computing device, or even a minimum
| willingness to _learn_ operating a simple tool, is still a huge
| addressable market - easily an order of magnitude larger than
| "developers".
|
| If anything, IFTTT and Zapier are proofs there is a market for
| this. The real problem is that everything these days is
| extremely locked down, everyone tries to control everything
| within their reach. As you note, there's hardly any useful API
| left anymore. Companies like Zapier succeed, because they sign
| contracts to integrate other services. They become a service
| aggregator, leaving user with no agency - whereas Pipes were
| all about users controlling their own automation. That part is
| hard to solve.
| ram_rar wrote:
| This brings back soo many old memories of mine @ Yahoo! . We had
| soo many tooling - YTS, YCS benchmarks, Vespa, SherpaDb, Pipes,
| shimproxy the list goes on. Its unfortunate leadership didn't
| have the foresight to saasify them in a way AWS did. Tooling at
| Yahoo!! was soo ahead of its time.
| winrid wrote:
| what was SherpaDb?
| ywain wrote:
| Presumably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Sherpa
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| I almost wrote my thesis on a system using Pipes, until my
| professor changed his mind and I did something else. Good times.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| I have no idea how to use this website, but if anyone wants to
| read up on pipes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes
| prepend wrote:
| My favorite "project awareness" technique for work was through
| pipes and I've never had something as quick as way back then.
|
| I had a yahoo pipe that combined and deduped about 10-15 jira
| projects and about 30-50 GitHub commit streams into a single rss
| feed that I read through google reader.
|
| It was glorious because it let me know quickly who changed what
| and when and where. And it was rss so I didn't have to search
| through email or look at multiple notification pages.
| ricklamers wrote:
| I have to plug one of my favorite workflow automation tools that
| is a namesake and was fairly recently developed:
| https://pipedream.com/
|
| Would definitely give it a try if you're looking to automate
| _Yahoo Pipes_ style.
|
| I have no affiliation to them, just a happy user
| Hortinstein wrote:
| Just signed up this seems like it will replace some docker
| containers I have running on a free tier of fly.io dumping into
| a supabase free tier. Very cool thank you for sharing!
| ewuhic wrote:
| Can I self-host it?
| ricklamers wrote:
| https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/issues/954
|
| No I don't think so. You probably want n8n if you're keen on
| self-hosting.
| ngoldbaum wrote:
| The owner, tod sacerdoti, is using it to scrape top stories
| from lobste.rs and submit them to HN as a karma arbitrage pump.
| Search todsacerdoti on https://gerikson.com/hnlo/ to see what
| I'm talking about. Judging by the amount of HN karma he's
| accumulated it seems to work very well.
| ricklamers wrote:
| TIL. Cross-posting breaks silos
| todsacerdoti wrote:
| Wow. Gaslight much?
| epilys wrote:
| Consider setting a delay of a few days before reposting,
| sometimes people post their own stuff on lobste.rs, want to
| also post on HN and you've already done so. It can be
| perceived negatively.
| JustinGoldberg9 wrote:
| I miss the internet circa 2013. I had a blog, and twitter would
| fetch content from the blog feed and automatically post it.
| Simple and elegant.
|
| Pipes is dead, at least we still have ifttt.
| leemailll wrote:
| I love Pipes, I also think it is the last best thing from yahoo
| majestic5762 wrote:
| Yahoo Pipes was full of XSS vulns. I used to play with cookie
| grabbers
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| I'm interested in how an article like this comes to be. I can
| tell that it was made with a lot of care and I'm sure it took a
| while to polish to the final result (high quality content +
| polish = high cost). I'm still not sure what's the purpose, it
| doesn't seem to be a marketing piece, although the underlying
| message is clear between the lines: if you liked pipes, you'll
| like retool. Or something along those lines.
| webel0 wrote:
| I am still reading but have the exact same question. The
| production value is high. The url is simply "retool.com/pipes"
| (I.e. not just another blog).
| glennfle wrote:
| Author of the story here! I've been a writer and journalist
| for nearly 30 years, and with the giant shift of advertising
| from traditional and then web publications to apps, social
| networks, and product sites (Amazon makes a fortune from
| ads), the number of places that publish long-form features
| has shrunk quite a bit. The ones that remain often have a
| tech billionaire or heir helping to fund them or they're the
| last survivors.
|
| I can't speak for Retool, of course, but it was pitched to me
| by my fabulous editor there as the company wanting to show
| the great visual editing tools of the past and make sure they
| weren't forgotten. They had already run a wildly fascinating
| story about Visual Basic, something I never thought I would
| be interested in, and it was riveting. There was no marketing
| involvement in the story at all. There's an interesting line
| where producing compelling editorial work shines a nice light
| on what you're doing as a company? Stripe published Increment
| for years, both online and in a very lovely print edition,
| and I wrote (for the same editor) for years for them until
| that no longer served Stripe's particular purpose for it. But
| it was all essentially independent editorial with nothing to
| do with Stripe's core mission.
|
| On the production side, I didn't see much of how it would
| look until it went live, and I think it tells an incredibly
| robust story--it's a great parallel to my reporting in a way
| that I've rarely seen in my whole career?!
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Thanks for the insights!
| thedougd wrote:
| The best part of Pipes was that no one blocked it or it was
| difficult to block. I used it to scrape data from web pages that
| I served up via Android widget apps.
| pythonbase wrote:
| I had my first taste of "automation" with Yahoo Pipes - scraping
| sites, generating alerts etc. Did a lot of workflows back in the
| day.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I never used Yahoo Pipes. Was it primarily for automating for
| manipulating stuff grabbed from the web. Or could you also
| usefully use it to wrangle/ETL local data files and databases?
| Glench wrote:
| Mostly web stuff. See also this great piece about Yahoo Pipes
| called "My Heart Feeds a Series of Tubes":
| https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-...
| newsclues wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Mania
| Glench wrote:
| If you're more handy with code, I'd also recommend checking out
| https://val.town which lets you quickly create automations and
| endpoints.
| stevekrouse wrote:
| Thanks! Founder of Val Town here :)
|
| I actually was notified of this comment because I "follow" Glen
| on HN via this val:
| https://www.val.town/v/rodrigotello/hnFollow
| g051051 wrote:
| Congrats to the authors for taking a potentially great article
| and wrecking it with insane distractions and useless web BS.
| Pipes was an amazing piece of software and deserves better than
| that.
| ksec wrote:
| Everytime I see Yahoo Pipes I remember the video [1] from Tom
| Scott about programming. ( The video title view count is updated
| in as close to real time as possible )
|
| [1] This Video Has 69,187,812 Views
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0
|
| A lot of what I thought were good, accessible, productive, entry
| to middle level technology ( HyperCards. Yahoo Pipes. Flash,
| Delphi etc ) never gained enough market. They were all the sort
| of middle ground good enough options. Instead technology is often
| filtered from the top end extreme. So everyone tries to use what
| Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft are using. Because those
| tools are deemed as what Professional should use. The only rare
| exception that is powering most of the word is Microsoft Excel.
| zubairq wrote:
| Great article by Retool! Yep, Pipes was something different a the
| time!
| danieldrehmer wrote:
| When people believed the internet was a series of tubes
| nathanwallace wrote:
| Readers may enjoy Flowpipe [1], an open source cloud scripting
| engine we launched this week. It allows creation of pipelines in
| HCL to connect HTTP queries, run containers, execute lambda-
| compatible functions, query databases, etc all from your own
| machine / CLI. It can also be combined with Steampie[2], our open
| source project to query cloud resources (139+ plugins) with SQL.
| We're more DevOps focused, but Yahoo Pipes was part of the
| inspiration for our naming of these "pipes" :-)
|
| 1 - https://github.com/turbot/flowpipe 2 -
| https://github.com/turbot/steampipe
| john-tells-all wrote:
| I _love_ Steampipe: it gives a simple and clear way to get
| feedback on many cloud resources. "select * from cloud" is a
| good synopsis.
|
| I'll check out Flowpipe!
| nathanwallace wrote:
| Thanks for your kind words - so great to hear that :-). We're
| really excited about Flowpipe and think it makes "cloud
| scripting" really fun & easy through pipelines - please let
| us know how you go and what we can improve!
| donatj wrote:
| I _loved_ Yahoo Pipes. I had so many pipes set up to filter RSS
| feeds and Podcasts down to just the types of content I cared
| about. Insanely useful, I miss it so much.
|
| A big example, I listen to a podcast where they have standard
| episodes and episodes where they play D&D and I just don't care
| about the D&D ones so it was really nice to be able to filter
| them out.
| charles_f wrote:
| Fun, that was also my primary use case for pipes. That and
| making title-only rss into full text rss
| freediver wrote:
| Proud Pipes user.
|
| Does the web need something like this today and in what form? All
| the replacements that are offered pale in comparison to
| excitement it was to use Pipes 15 years ago. Are we simply past
| that point?
| troyvit wrote:
| I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it
| looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough
| team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer
| a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users.
| "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes
| calls per month" is the quote from the article.
|
| The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model
| these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats.
| It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time.
|
| That said I've been collecting different "business glue"
| products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they
| aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but
| maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on
| open source tools but some aren't.
|
| - n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/
|
| - Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in
| this thread)
|
| - trigger dev: trigger.dev
|
| - automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/
|
| - Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-
| started/introducti...
|
| - Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn
|
| - budibase: https://budibase.com/
|
| - windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/
|
| - tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows
|
| - Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce
| <-> PostgreSQL)
|
| - Zapier: zapier.com/
|
| Anyway I hope some of these are fun!
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Big Node-RED fan here. For me it has the perfect combination
| between visual flow based programming[0] and textual coding.
| It makes a great effort in making visual programming
| incredible efficient.
|
| Node-RED does great job in implementing the ideas of FBP in
| visual manner.
|
| [0] = https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/
| coldacid wrote:
| There are so many quality of life improvements I could make for
| myself if only Pipes was still around. Nothing I've encountered
| since has ever matched or beat it.
| kossTKR wrote:
| I feel like theres a potential for B2B solutions in this space.
| Especially for workers who want to bootstrap something quick,
| avoid something like Teams or other behemoths, create something
| for a one time survey, campaign, shorter process etc.
|
| So much was lost transitioning from web 2.0 to whatever walled
| dystopian garbage we have now.
|
| The concept of pipes are way back from the Unix days, and the
| idea of this modularity and later building stuff from a flow
| based interface like this somehow never translated into anything
| on the frontend side.
|
| I've been met with simple specs that had to be built with custom
| web solutions a few times now where i've almost started building
| a generalised model like this that could scale because most apps
| could be defined like this, as entities related with filters
| between them in sequences related to each other and web views
| where people could interact.
|
| The closest i found back then was something like Airtable/Zapier
| combinations that was extremely limited.
| RyLuke wrote:
| (Hi, Retool employee here who worked on this piece.)
|
| This is the second installment[1] in what we hope will be a
| regular series telling the stories of novel programming
| environments that had a lot of influence on developers.
|
| Creating these is a labor of love--we get to talk to the original
| teams who built products that were formational for us. We have an
| incredible in-house creative team that finds a way to sneak these
| fun mini-sites in amongst their other work.
|
| For me, the most exciting part of working on a product like
| Retool is that it's an evolution of lot of ideas from the past.
| We're always looking at prior art to spark ideas and challenge
| our assumptions as we're building. There are many great ideas in
| old computing papers and products that were either before their
| time, or lost when there were major shifts in the industry. Pipes
| was a touchpoint for us as we built out one of our newer
| products[2].
|
| We have lots of ideas for future installments in this series, but
| if you have any programming environments that were near and dear
| to you heart, let me know!
|
| [1] Our first deep-dive was on Visual Basic. I'm very biased (I
| wrote it!), but if you like Glenn's Pipes piece, you'll probably
| enjoy this one too. :) https://retool.com/visual-basic
|
| [2] Retool Workflows: https://retool.com/workflows
| apitman wrote:
| Hi Ryan, I appreciate the artistic approach taken, but thought
| you might want to know the page barely works for me in Firefox
| 120 on Linux 6.6. Everything is very laggy and the
| scrolljacking is terrible. Chromium is much smoother but the
| scrolljacking is still bad.
|
| Generally speaking I don't think Linux is a target platform
| worth worrying too much about, but when it comes to
| programming-related content that might not be the case.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Generally speaking I don 't think Linux is a target
| platform_
|
| Maybe, but you'd think an iOS iPad might be a target. I just
| closed the tab, as there's no reader view, and the janky
| scrolling and waiting for text to load (text!) wasn't worth
| the effort.
| coldacid wrote:
| Any hints on what's next? Smalltalk, perhaps, or HyperCard, or
| maybe NeXTSTEP Interface Builder?
| julianeon wrote:
| I think you could make the case that Zapier is the monetized
| version of Pipes. It's a 5 billion dollar company now.
| donnellyp wrote:
| i have a few (new, unworn) pipes tshirts left. mostly XL thou.
| and a ton of pipes stickers.
| apitman wrote:
| Are you selling them?
| Towaway69 wrote:
| For anyone interested in visual programming, I would recommend
| having a look at Flow Based Programming[0] better known for being
| the inspiration for Unix pipes, which in turn were name giver for
| pipes in yahoo pipes.
|
| [0]=https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Another amazing node-based app that was deprecated is Quartz
| Composer on Mac. It was extended by Mike Matas' team when he was
| at Facebook: https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-
| glass/introducing...
|
| although this was also later deprecated in favor of Origami
| Studio, which retains the node-based UI: https://origami.design/
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