Node-RED is a visual programming interface tailor-made for the Internet of things concept. It requires almost no or little coding experience, and makes it easy to connect physical things to the cloud. This IBM emerging technology takes mankind one step closer in hacking the world as per our needs; providing tools to make this process a lot less cumbersome.
The Internet of Things, is currently at the early stages of its large scale implementation. With Node-RED more developers, even those with less coding expertise can contribute to the growth of this field.
What is Node-RED?
Node-RED is an event managing and handling tool based on Node.js. The Node-RED application, usually runs as a web server, and users can customise and manipulate the interconnections between various hardware and create functional flows from any computer’s browser. No expensive or memory drenching software, it is simple and runs in your web browser itself. This server application also has the capability to run on devices like the Raspberry Pi.
This entire functionality of the Node-RED is that, you no longer need to enter all the code (at least most of the time) and work with pre contained code. The user interface of Node-RED looks so simple and revealing, you’d hardly have any problems in developing your IoT project with it. Node-RED flows in GitHub actually are represented in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and can be easily exported to the clipboard or can be imported into Node-RED or shared online.
Though Node-RED doesn’t completely replace the need to write code altogether, but it significantly reduces it. In this process the best part is that developers can now concentrate more on building great apps rather than writing same old code repeatedly, which kills creativity.
The fact that Node-RED is open source allows developers to add back to the society. With more and more nodes being added, complex tasks become more simplified and are converted to a matter of drag-and-drop. It’s such an ecosystem which can extend to several other fields with newer tools being built on top of it. If you are looking to work on a project related to IoT, do check out the prowess of the team behind Node-RED without fail.