Node-RED has reached version 2.0. The visual tool for connecting hardware devices with APIs and online services has now dropped support for older versions of Node.js that are themselves no longer supported. The new release includes the first versions of the Node-RED Flow Debugger and Linter.

Node-RED, which began life as a project of the UK-based IBM Emerging Technology team, is a visual tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services. 

It provides a browser-based editor that can be used to wire together flows using a variety of nodes. Each node can be a small JavaScript program which accepts a message in the form of a JSON object and produces JSON objects to pass on to other nodes. An HTML file is used to define the node's properties for the editor.

The fact that the new release no longer includes support for old versions of Node.js has allowed the developers to make some major dependency updates internally. They say that this has required time and effort to do properly, meaning the new version hasn't a lot of big new features.

That said, the new flow debugger and linter are both good additions that will improve the developer experience. The debugger acts like regular code debuggers, but at the flow level. You can set breakpoints on node ports, either inputs or outputs. Then, whenever a message arrives at a breakpoint, it pauses either at that node, or the entire runtime. Once paused, you can see how many messages are queued up at each point in the flow and in the sidebar you can see the queue of messages in the order they will be processed.

The flow linter, nrlint, can be used to identify potential problems in the flow based on a large set of rules the linter provides. Nick O'Leary, creator of Node-RED, says that as an example of its use, it can warn if you have HTTP In nodes that aren’t connected to HTTP Response nodes. The team has modelled the linter after eslint,  which is also bundled in one of the rules that can be used to lint the JavaScript in function nodes.

Other improvements to the new version optional support for the Monaco text editor, which gives a richer code editing experience in the Function node, though Node-RED will still use the ACE editor by default. There are also various Node updates including support for both CJS modules and ES6 modules.

Node-RED is available now. 

More Information

Node-RED homepage

Related Articles

Node-RED IoT Tool 1.0 Released

JS Foundation Supported by IBM

Node-RED Another Way To The IoT  

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info