>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Node Summit 2017 in downtown San Francisco at the Mission Bay Convention Center. About 800 hardcore developers talkin' about Node and really the crazy growth and acceleration in this community as well as the applications. We're excited to have our next quest. He's Nick O'Leary, Developer Advocate from IBM for Watson IoT, and you're workin' on somethin' kind of cool called Node-REDS. First off, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you very much for havin' me. >> Absolutely, so what is Node-RED? >> So, Node-RED is an open source project we started working on about four years ago now in the Emerging Technologies group in the UK parts of IBM, and it's a Node.js application that gives you a visual programming tool for Internet of Things-type applications. So when you run it, you point your web browser at it, and it gives you this visual workspace to start dragging in nodes into your canvas that represent some sort of functionality, like connect to Twitter and get some tweets or save something to a database or read some sensor data, whatever it might be, and you start drawing wires between those nodes to express how you want your application to flow, how you want data to flow through your application. So it's quite a lightweight tool and really accessible to a wide range of developers whether sort of seasoned, experienced Node developers or your kids just learning how to program because it hides complexity. And, yeah, it's Node.js-based, so it runs down on a Raspberry Pi, it runs up in the cloud like IBM Bluemix, wherever you want to run it. So really flexible developer platform. >> Pretty interesting 'cause we just had Monica on from Intel, and she was talking about one of the interesting things in this development world of Node.js is so much of the code was written by somebody else. I think she said in a lot of projects the actual original code may be 2% because you're using all these other stuff, and libraries have already been created. And it sounds like you're really kind of leveraging that infrastructure to be able to do something like this. >> Absolutely, so, one of the key things we enabled very early on was to, 'cause we recognized the power of our tool, is those nodes in our palette that you drag on. So we built the system so that people could write their own nodes and extend the palette, and we used the same node packaging as the standard MPM ecosystem. And as of a couple weeks ago, we have over a thousand third party nodes people have written, so there's probably already a module for most hardware devices, online APIs, databases, whatever you want. People are creating and extending the platform in all sorts of ways just building on top of that incredible ecosystem that Node.js has. >> And then how does that tie back to Watson? You said you're involved in Watson. So Watson people don't think of necessarily a simple, simple interface but not necessarily a simple application. So what's the tie between Watson and Node.js and Node-RED? >> So, Node-RED is a development tool. I say it all hinges on those nodes and what they connect to, so we have got nodes for the Watson IoT platform, so that's great for getting, if you're running node-RED on a Raspberry Pi, connected up to our IoT platform, connect to applications in the Bluemix space. But we also have nodes for the Watson cognitive services, like the machine learning things, visual recognition, text to speech, all of those services we have nodes for. So, again, it allows people to start playing with the rich capabilities of the Watson platform without having to dive straight into understanding lines of code and you can start being productive and create real meaningful solutions without having to understand whether it's Node.js or Java, whatever language you would normally write to access low-level APIs. >> And can the visual tool connect to things that are not necessarily Node specific? >> So, anything that provides some sort of API. If it's got a programmatic API, then it's easier to do with Node 'cause we are in a Node ecosystem. But we've got established patterns for talking to other languages but also things often provides like a rest API, HTTP, MQTT, many other protocols, and we have all of that support built straight into the platform. >> Right, and so what was the motivation to build this, just to have an easier development interface? >> Yeah, it was twofold really. One was in the Emerging Technologies where I was, we do proof of concepts for clients we have to turn around really quickly, so whereas we're more than capable of writing individual lines of code, having that tool that lets us experiment much quicker and solve real client problems much quicker was a great value to us. But then we also saw the advantage for the developers who don't understand individual lines of code for educational purposes, whatever it might be. Those great motivators there in the various communities we're involved with, in IoT home hobbyists, all that sort of space as well, it's found a real incredible user community across the board. >> And when it started, was it designed to be an open source project or that kind of realization, if you will, kind of came along the way? >> I think on day one it wasn't the first thing to mind. You know, we were just experimenting with technology, which is kind of how we operated. But we very quickly got to the point where we realized we didn't have the time and resource to write all the nodes that could be written, and there was a much broader audience than just us doing our day job that this tool could tap into. So, maybe not on day one but maybe on a month in we thought this has to be open source. So, it was about six months after we started it we moved to an open source project, and that was September 2013. And then in October last year, IBM contributed the project to be a founding project of the JavaScript Foundation. Whereas it's a project that has come from IBM, it's now a project that is independently governed. It's not owned by IBM, it's part of the foundation. So, look at the wide range of other companies getting involved, making use of it, contributing back, and really good to see that ecosystem build. >> Oh, that's great, so I'm just curious, you said you deal with a lot of customer prototyping. Obviously you're involved in Watson, which is kind of the pointy end of the spear right now with IBM, with the cognitive and the IoT. As you kind of look at the landscape and stuff you're workin' on over the next, I would never say multiple years 'cause that's way too long, six months, nine months, what are some of your priorities, what are some of the things you're seeing, kind of that customers are doing today that they couldn't do before that gets you excited to get up out of bed and go to work every day? >> From my perspective, with our focus on Node-RED, which is kind of where my focus is right now, it's really that developer experience. We've gone so far with our really intuitive to use tooling, but we recognize there's more to do. So, how can we enable better collaboration, better basic workflows within our particular tooling, because there are people using Node-RED, in particular happily in production today, but it's funny 'cause we don't have a 1.0 version number because, for us, that wasn't interesting to us because we are delivering meaningful function. But in the project, we have just published our road map to a one point zero to really give that firm statement to people who are unsure about it as a technology that this is good for production. And we've got a wealth of use cases of companies who are using it today, so, that's very much our focus, my focus within Node-RED, and all of it does then tie back to yes, it's a JS foundation project, but then with my developer advocate hat on, making sure that draw from Node-RED into the Watson platform is as seamless and intuitive as possible because that helps everyone. >> Right, right, okay, so before I let you go, two things: One begs the question what version are you on, and where can people go to find more information so they can see when that 1.0 and obviously contribute? >> So as a Node project, we've stuck to Symantec versioning, so we are currently version naught dot 17. So we've done 17 major releases over the last about three and a bit years, and that's where we're moving forward. We've got this road map to get to 1.0 first quarter of next year. And if you want to find out more, nodered.org is where we're based, or you can find us through links by the JS Foundation as well. >> Alright, well, Nick, thanks for takin' a little bit of your time and safe travels home at the end of the show. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, he's Nick O'Leary from IBM. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watchin' theCUBE. Thanks for watchin', see ya next time. (bubbly electronic music)