Node-RED has reached version 1.0 with improvements including a new asynchronous message passing model,  and a new Node Send API.

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.

To make development easier, Node-RED has a large collection of pre-created nodes designed for many common tasks such as sending and receiving messages in a variety of formats, running commands, and processing files. You also get nodes for more complex purposes, and more are being added all the time. 

The 1.0 release changes the message passing between nodes to be always asynchronous rather than it being sometimes asynchronous and sometimes synchronous depending on the implementation of individual nodes.

Another change is the addition of a new API for nodes to use when handling messages in the runtime. This API allows them to tell the runtime when they have finished with a message. The advantage this offers is that the runtime will find it easier to track nodes as they flow through the system. This also means the developers will in the future be able to add features such as automatic timeouts of nodes. Alongside the API, there's a new Complete node that can be targeted at another node, like the Catch node, and it will be triggered when the targeted node finishes handling a message.

The other main change to the beta release of Node-RED is retweaking of the editor, with a reorganization of the visual editor palette, and the removal of some nodes from the default palette. 

More Information

Node-RED homepage

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