Comment by staticvar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by staticvar | Hacker News Reader

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The gist I get is that it's a daemon for a gateway device (like a Raspberry Pi) that you configure data flows via JSON files. The Flogo CLI seems to be a JSON generator (https://github.com/TIBCOSoftware/flogo-cli/blob/master/READM...). They compare their functionality to Nodered (http://nodered.org/) except it doesn't have a GUI (they mention working on it) and instead of being written in Node.js, it's written in Go.

I'm of the opinion that these frameworks for Gateway devices are reinventing Unix pipe and cron, that integrations for devices and databases should be written in any language (as CLI), and running logic on the gateway is 90% of the time not what you want to do, you just want to pull data from a device and push it to a database somewhere. Shameless plug, in my free time I work on Open Pipe Kit, a project that is building CLI for devices and databases. We're currently working on a series of DIY LORA Nodes for Agriculture. If anyone is interested in lending a hand, please reach out. http://openpipekit.github.io

Nice work with the open pipe project. Looks perfect for DIY sensor/telemetry projects.

If you are looking to monetize connectivity services, you certainly will need a bi-directional architecture to push values back to end nodes, and compute resources available at the gateway for data filtering, preprocessing, and security.

But these are tasks that AWS IoT, Azure IoT, and GCP IoT are currently tackling with a lot of resources. So it would be hard to compete at that level.

libwebsockets is better suited comparing to the pub/sub model for that? two-way communication is pretty tricky(NAT-traversal etc) sometimes, I am still opt for the old but reliable polling mode for most of IoT nodes.

Thanks. While our examples are usually "pull from some device and push to a database", with farmOS we experimented with "pull from a database and push to a device". In this way, pipes are used to transfer state of a device two ways. This depends on a database UI giving users the option to modify the state of something, something that IoT databases like Phant (http://data.sparkfun.com) and Adafruit IO (http://io.adafruit.com) don't currently support.

Except the daemon part, I think you got the gist of it right - thank you!

The one thing I would like to add is that flogo-lib is a full-fledged process engine which means you can craft (or soon enough visually model!) rather expressive flow definitions unlike a request-reply pipeline or HTTP middleware.

(Disclaimer: I'm a PM working on Project Flogo at TIBCO)

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