Pipes

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Pipes

> Pipes is a mechanism by which you the user can create an internet
> application all of your own—by requiring little more on your part than
> dragging and dropping. It's a reference to pipes in Unix, for all you Unix
> programmers, but now refers to internet processes rather than shell
> utilities. There's a good explanation here [1] and here [2]. Check it out.
>

“Yahoo! Pipes [3]”

Yahoo! Pipes [4] is a simple, if rather graphically stunning, visual
programming environment for making simple web-based applications that filter
and mash up data from a variety of web-based sources. In less than a minute,
I had created Die Boston Tagebücher [5], a German translation of The Boston
Diaries [6] by hooking up my syndication feed [7] to Babelfish [8] to do the
actual translation.

In fact, looking over the modules available, I could probably recreate my
metasearch engine [9] in about an hour or so, provided I could get the
results in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) (back when I wrote three versions
of a metasearch engine, you pretty much had to write code to fetch URL
(Universal Resource Locators)s, roll your own HTML (HyperText Markup
Language) parser and deal with the low level guts of CGI (Common Gateway
Interface) programming—such is progress). But in the few minutes of playing
around with it, it doesn't seem to be very tolerant of errors; it fails more
times than not (but then again, it appears to have just been released and the
response is more than expected).

Besides, the operations it currently allows are very limited. I thought it
might be nice to do some content analysis for each entry, then feed the
result into a Flickr [10] image search, but there isn't a way to simply
extract the content analysis for another module to use. Maybe that will
change over time, but for now, it's only for simplistic data manipulations.

What really got me was the user interface and building the “pipes”—it's all
very slick and it reminds me of a “programming langauge” I had for the Amiga
years ago. It was less a “programming langauge” and more of a visual “plug-n-
play” type system for programming—a type of visual flow-charting program that
could generate code to run, although I don't recall the name of the
application, it made that much of a lasting impression on me. And I find it
amusing that the interfaces to each module are typed—and here I thought that
the prevailing programming mantra of today was “up with dynamic typing [11],
down with static typing!” (more on that in a later post). But this also
reminds me more of a prototyping or documenting tool than a real programming
tool, much like the first time I saw Visual Basic [12] (which I thought was
very cool when I first saw it, which will probably surprise a lot of people).

[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/07/yahoo-launches-pipes/
[2] http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/pipes_and_filte.html
[3] http://yargb.blogspot.com/2007/02/yahoo-pipes.htm
[4] http://pipes.yahoo.com/
[5] http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/PEbDlt242xGLDC9ozKky6g/
[6] https://boston.conman.org/
[7] https://boston.conman.org/index.atom
[8] http://babelfish.altavista.com/
[9] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/
[10] http://www.flickr.com/
[11] http://www.chimu.com/publications/short/whyDynamicTyping.html
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic

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