IoT developers need to integrate a variety of protocols, backend components and services; they often need to pre and post-process data as well as react to changes in the real world. Data flow programming tools have been introduced in a number of related domains to provide a flexible, but easy to use visual programming environment for rapid development. The open source Node-RED system provides such a tool for IoT applications, but is limited to executing a single flow file in a single thread. In this paper we describe the design of our system called the Front-End for Node-RED (FRED) that manages multiple instances of Node-RED for logged in users, allowing Node-RED to be used as a cloud-hosted data flow mashup tool for the IoT. We present some examples of how some of our 1800+ users are using FRED for IoT mashups, and some of the challenged we faced in implementing the FRED system.
Preprint: full publication in Michael Blackstock and Rodger Lea. 2016. FRED: A Hosted Data Flow Platform for the IoT.
In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Mashups of Things and APIs (MOTA '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA,
Article 2, 5 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3007203.3007214