Yahoo! pipes – yet another workflow?

Nice presentation about YP – looks like they are going to start allowing custom web services. Drastically reduces coding – often to zero:

• 10% of the web 2.0 pyramid (coders, remixers, bloggers)
• assume prior knowledge (loops, data types)

Heart of system is, of course, web data.

• engine tuned for RSS but not necessarily.
• editor – nearly everything can do it in browser. Instant “ON” – no downloads. Dataflow apps tuned to visual programming. learn and propagate by “view source” (this is valuable metaphor)
• design – easy to use. highlights valid connections. l2r readability. (find pizza within 1 mile of foo), dragability. debuggable on refresh.

Certainly looks slickr than Taverna. Uses <canvas> tag in many browsers. Runs on any modern browser (IE6/7 via SVG). Performance degrades with transparent layers. worst problem for Canvas is that it occludes DOM events (only click). [Obviously fairly hairy programming was required – transparency, drag etc.]. API rate limits (i.e. if your pipe is popular you might use up API rate)
XML, JSON, KML GeoRSS. Disposable Applications? And perhaps XML-over-the-web has finally arrived?