Node-RED is a visual tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services. The latest release of Node-RED 3 brings a new alternative text editor and support for continuous search.

Node-RED, which began life as a project of the UK-based IBM Emerging Technology team provides a browser-based editor that can be used to wire together flows using a variety of nodes. Each node can be a small JavaScript program which accepts a message in the form of a JSON object and produces JSON objects to pass on to other nodes. An HTML file is used to define the node's properties for the editor.

Version 3.0 of Node-RED has a number of improvements to the editor interface, starting with a right-click context menu in the workspace, and improved debugging of flows with a new tooltip that shows the full location of the node when you hover over a node.

There's a new special node type called junction that can make it easier to route the wires in a flow, and the developers say that unlike the various ‘no-op’ nodes that have been published to the community to help achieve similar results, the Junctions are far more compact and less obtrusive in the flow.

A new continuous search option has been added; specifically, this lets you move between matches in a set of search results. There are also more predefined searches, including the ability to restrict the search to the current flow.

The Monaco Text Editor was actually added as a component to offer an alternative to the default Ace Editor a year ago in the 2.x release. The developers say it has proved to be very stable and provides a much richer user experience, so in this release they have switched over to Monaco as the default editor.

Node-RED 3.0 is available now. 

More Information

Node-RED homepage

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