What are the flaws of Node-RED? The areas that you plan (or hope) to give many, many necessary love somewhere in the future?
What is something people use the software for, where you would say they should not do this?
Node-RED seems so far optimized for IoT and online services. Is there any ability (or plans for them) to use it locally for desktop-automation, similiar to AppleScript & Automator on MacOS, shell & batch-scripts, Selenium for websites, Tasker on android, etc.?
How would you see the state of the project generally and feature-wise ? Is it still growing for the next decade? Or has it reached it's peak and will move to settle down at its optimum somewhere in the next years? Should it reinvent itself every some years and stay fresh and adapting?
(Node-RED project lead here) Some great questions, and not necessarily short answers.
> What are the flaws of Node-RED? The areas that you plan (or hope) to give many, many necessary love somewhere in the future?
It works really well as a single user system. One of the areas I really want to improve is the multi-user/collaborative features available in the editor.
You can certainly have >1 users editing the same flows in parallel, but you do end up having to merge back in each other's changes. That user experience isn't ideal.
I'm also keenly aware the documentation and getting started experience needs attention.
> What is something people use the software for, where you would say they should not do this?
I wouldn't tell someone not to use the project if they had found something that worked for them. As with any solution, you need to make sure it satisfies your needs and requirements.
I would say you need to acknowledge the limits of the system - partly born of the single-threaded nature of the underlying Node.js runtime.
> Is there any ability (or plans for them) to use it locally for desktop-automation, similiar to AppleScript & Automator on MacOS, shell & batch-scripts, Selenium for websites, Tasker on android, etc.?
It isn't something we're thinking about in the core of the project. But the project is designed so that this could all be done via 3rd party nodes created and shared by the community to integrate with those tools. In other words, this sort of integration could be done by anyone - it doesn't have to be the core project that does it.
> How would you see the state of the project generally and feature-wise ?
There's always more to be done.
> Should it reinvent itself every some years and stay fresh and adapting
There's a risk for all software projects that continually reinvent themselves that they sacrifice their existing community in search of something else.
A core principle we have is stability. That doesn't mean stagnation, but it means evolving in a considered way that brings the community with us and doesn't leave users stranded because they depend on something that has since been 'reinvented'.
I can on reply from the perspective of a multi-year user:
It is primarily functional programming. This means, you have an input, that is processed through blocks (functions) and does some things.
This is GREAT for things similar to IFTTT (If this then that) applications. E.g. you receive a datagramm via MQTT, and then format it, add some info, and upload it into influxdb.
You can also easily add a small dashboard with some buttons and labels for easy home automation.
What needs some working around with context store are side effects, or persistance. I have two examples that can be worked around, but are rather hacky:
1) Reading a list from a homepage, and only sending updates for new items. This is the prime example for context - you save a list of seen items in the context of the function node, so the next invocation can filter out the existing ones
2) Using a switch in the dashboard for selecting between automatic and manual mode. E.g. I want to have my rack fans controlled by the temperature, but with an override to set it manually. This needs a bit more hacking with context where you have two flows into one node, and you have to set the internal state of the context depending on the override button.
my use of it for hobbyist projects helped me get my foot in the door for my current employment in automation and controls.
I have multiple instances of it running to track various things, run my chicken coop door, send alerts, aggregate data... It's uses are endless and I enjoy the puzzle of using the new updates to the software to make my old flows better.
I'm a big Node-Red fan, been using it for years to automate and do lots of neat things. One problem I kept coming back to was trying to create dynamic urls for websockets. I'm curious if that might be on a future roadmap for Node-Red?
IOT guy here, I like node-red but never dare to run it on edge device to perform ops on critical infrastructure. what is the state of the project? prototype only or business ready?
(Node-RED project lead here) It is not at all limited to prototyping. There are an ever-growing number of companies incorporating Node-RED in their own products and services - you can see a list of some of them on the project homepage.
They span a wide range of industries and technology areas. Quite a few are industrial controller companies who include Node-RED on their commercially available edge devices.
How do you feel Node-RED stacks up against products like Boomi, MuleSoft, SnapLogic, etc., and is competing with those iPaaS vendors something you want to do?
(Node-RED project lead here) Node-RED is an open-source project and part of the OpenJS Foundation. We'd certainly aspire Node-RED to be comparable at a technical level with other offerings.
But as an OSS project, we aren't looking to create a hosted SaaS offering - the core project isn't trying to compete commercially with those vendors.
But there are companies looking to create commercial services around Node-RED that certainly want to be competitive. (My own company, FlowForge Inc, is one of them)
I want to thank you and the team for developing and improving this project. I used it early on to prototype a system based on Raspberry Pi's and AWS. It is very easy to build on and the library of integrations is great.
I’ve been looking at building an auto remediation system for server alerts, is Node-RED a decent system for this? It will probably start with just triggering some kind of ssh command to run a script.
I'm not an NR user yet but I've implemented my basic Home Assistant set up and plan to begin using NR extensively as I evolve my home automation beyond "Hello World".
(Node-RED project lead here) There are a few nodes for dealing with swagger in Node-RED - either generating Swagger doc for your HTTP end points, or on the client side to make it easy to interact with a Swagger documented API.
If you're looking for something that can take a Swagger/OpenAPI doc and generate a stubbed-out set of flows - that would be a neat idea. Sounds like a cool project to create as a pluing.
