Yahoo Pipes

May 2, 2007 – Saint-Petersburg

Yahoo released Pipes service few month ago. The aim of this project is to bring possibility of mashups creating to much broader audience. This service has a lot of coverage in different blogs such as techcrunch, oreilly radar and much more

There is video with pipe developers on google video.

I would like to summarize some thoughts about pips in this post.

What I would like to have in pipes is some high-level language that could be used simultaneously with GUI constructor. It would be great if Pipes behave same way as UML tools that could export java code(or code on other mainstream language) and if we change java code all changes incorporated into diagram. Creating such tool for general programming language is quite hard task but I don’t think that it would be very hard for DSL with very limited syntax. I suppose that Pipes team already has some kind of language in their backend.

With such DSL we could:

Send code fragments or entire pipes by mail or by post it to discussion groups (as pipes created for amateurs it is especially important to have ways ask questions in discussion groups).

Diagrams definitely looks cool but how can I quickly see what is different in two version of pipe. With text representation any diff utility could be used.

I would like to store pipe in repository and return to any previous version if I need. With DSL there is no problem but now it is impossible.

GUI editor is impressive web application but in some cases it is not convenient. For example lot of pipes contains parameters like this: . We see only a few symbols from in field.

For me the most killer feature of Pipes is possibility to export pipe result in json format. This is very cool and I think that we will see a lot of new light-weight mashups. What very frequently stops me from creating some small and cool mashup is that I need to create database, write server side code not forgetting about caching, potential sql injections and all that not so funny stuff. Server side applications always try to stop working after hosting upgrades :). With pipes small mashups could be created much more easily. Mash data on pipes server and use results in client side AJAX application that consist from static javascript and html files.

Pipes is actively developing project and new features adding. Especially nice that new sources of data appearing.