OUseful.Info, the blog…

Wouldn’t it be handy if you could use Yahoo Pipes as code free rapid prototyping development environment, then export the code and run it on your own server, or elsewhere in the cloud? Well now you can, using Greg Gaughan’s pipe2py and the Google App Engine “Pipes Engine” app.

As many readers of OUseful.info will know, I’m an advocate of using the visual editor/drag and drop feed-oriented programming application that is Yahoo Pipes. Some time ago, I asked the question What Happens if Yahoo Pipes Dies?, partly in response to concerns raised at many of the Pipes workshops I’ve delivered about the sustainability, as well as the reliability, of the Yahoo Pipes platform.

A major issue was that the “programmes” developed in the Pipes environment could only run in that environment. As I learned from pipes guru @hapdaniel, however, it is possible to export a JSON representation of a pipe and so at least grab some sort of copy of a pipes programme. This led to me doodling some ideas around the idea of a Yahoo Pipes Documentation Project, which would let you essentially export a functional specification of a pipe (I think the code appears to have rotted or otherwise broken on this?:-(

This in turn led naturally to Starting to Think About a Yahoo Pipes Code Generator, whereby we could take a description of a pipe and generate a code equivalent version from it.

Greg Gaughan took up the challenge with Pipe2Py (described here) to produce a pipes compiler capable of generating and running Python equivalents of a Yahoo pipe (not all Pipes blocks are implemented yet, but it works well for simple pipes).

And now Greg has gone a step further, by hosting pipe2py on Google App engine so you can make a working Python backup of a pipe in that environment, and run it: Running Yahoo! Pipes on Google App Engine.

As with pipe2py, it won’t work for every Yahoo pipe (yet!), but you should be okay with simpler pipes. (Support for more blocks is being added all the time, and implementations of currently supported blocks also get an upgrade if, as and when any issues are found with them. If you have a problem, or suggestion for a missing block, add a comment on Greg’s blog;-)

(Looking back over my old related posts, deploying to Google Apps also seems to be supported by Zoho Creator.)

Quite by chance, @paulgeraghty tweeted a link to an old post by @progrium on the topic of “POSS == Public Open Source Services: … or User Powered Self-sustaining Cloud-based Services of Open Source Software”:

How many useful bits of cool plumbing are made and abandoned on the web because people realize there’s no true business case for it? And by business case, I mean make sense to be able to turn a profit or at least enough to pay the people involved. Even as a lifestyle business, it still has to pay for at least one person … which is a lot! But forget abandoned … how much cool tech isn’t even attempted because there is an assumption that in order for it to survive and be worth the effort, there has to be a business? Somebody has to pay for hosting! Alternatively, what if people built cool stuff because it’s just cool? Or useful (but not useful enough to get people to pay — see Twitter)?

Well this is common in open source. A community driven by passion and wanting to build cool/useful stuff. A lot of great things have come from open source. But open source is just that … source. It’s not run. You have to run it. How do you get the equivalent of open source for services? This is a question I’ve been trying to figure out for years. But it’s all coming together now …

Enter POSS

POSS is an extension of open source. You start with some software that provides a service (we’ll just say web service … so it can be a web app or a web API, whatever — it runs “in the cloud”). The code is open source. Anybody can fix bugs or extend it. But there is also a single canonical instance of this source, running as a service in the cloud. Hence the final S … but it’s a public service. Made for public benefit. That’s it. Not profit. Just “to be useful.” Like most open source.

Hmmm….. ;-)