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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

Pipes was _awesome_. I built many personal services with it - (and even a few low traffic production services!)

Really tragic they killed it, that's when I knew the Mayer era of Yahoo would be nothing more than a hatchet job.

I wish they made it F/OSS as part of the shutdown. Nothing has filled the void.

As someone who just briefly used Pipes for a couple of things and don't remember the service fully: What unique features of Pipes do you remember that nothing else been able to replicate?

We built apps for Yahoos connected TV platform (it was based on the Konfabulator widget engine) back in the day. Getting API support from clients (broadcast networks) for niche platforms was next to impossible and trying to aggregate all the data via multiple calls on constrained devices wasn’t feasible either.

We used pipes to aggregate multiple services into a single API a few times at Yahoo’s recommendation and it worked pretty well. Also helped get around some CORS issues IIRC.

A drag-and-drop engine for building extract/transform/load machines that ran in the cloud at no cost?

You could make HTTP REST requests to pretty much anything and parse the result and do whatever you wanted with it.

You could use Yahoo pipes to glue APIs together.

If you were the creative sort, the possibilities were endless.

Can you name another product currently on the market that can do that?

Node-RED?

Oh wow! You are right! This is very similar. Thanks

https://ifttt.com/

This one looks promising from an open source alternative that you can host locally:

https://github.com/huginn/huginn

Ifttt is a joke compared to Yahoo Pipes. It can only do a very limited number of pre-defined transformations and it’s only 2 steps.

Yahoo Pipes was basically programming with a UI.

whatever your opinion is, it is still a viable alternative for doing simple things. the dude asked for alternatives, not opinions.

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