IBM Corp.’s Emerging Technology Group in the United Kingdom needed a way to speed churn proofs of concept for clients. The resulting development platform, Node-RED, hides complexity so well, even code-illiterates can use it, according to Nick O’Leary (pictured), Watson Internet of Things developer advocate at IBM.

“It allows people to start playing with the rich capabilities of the Watson platform without having to dive straight into lines of code,” O’Leary said. Watson is IBM’s cognitive computing and artificial intelligence supercomputer.

O’Leary spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Node Summit in San Francisco, California.

Open-source development 101 to advanced

Node-RED is a visual programming tool for Internet of Things applications IBM developed four years ago. It has since contributed the platform to the open-source JavaScript Foundation. Users point a web browser at Node-RED, which then provides a visual canvas. They can drag in nodes that represent various functions. These may include culling tweets from Twitter.com, saving to a particular database or reading sensor data. They can draw wires between these nodes to orchestrate the flow of data through an application.

The platform is democratized for use by coding novices, since most of the complexity is out of sight, O’Leary stated. Node-RED offers flexible deployment options; it can run on a Raspberry Pi computer or in a cloud, for example.

The platform can connect to any function that provides an application program interface, O’Leary explained, and those functions supported by the platform are constantly growing.

“We built the system so that people could write their own nodes and extend the palette,” he said.

So far, Node-RED has acquired more than 1,000 third-party nodes from open-source contributors.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Node Summit 2017.

Photo: SiliconANGLE