Node-RED, the JS Foundation’s flow-based programming tool which allows for rapid application development and is used to map data flows within IoT applications continues to grow in both adoption as well as support and contribution. Today, Hitachi has announced (article currently only in Japanese) that they will be contributing new, critical features to the Node-RED project and that Node-RED will be an integral piece in their IoT platform, Lumada, which is a multi-tiered platform designed to bring critical insights into an organizations IoT data.

In their work to develop and advance their Lumada platform, Hitachi realized that it would be critical for their customers and partners to be able to easily develop IoT solutions and that a “low-code” environment like Node-RED would bring this to the platform. At the same time, it was clear that additional features would be needed in Node-RED to optimize its use in Lumada. Specifically, the need for automating the communication and cooperation of different systems would be critical to their customers. This need led to the creation and contribution of Flow Connection Gateway which manages this communication between systems. They have also created functionality to automatically generate Node parameters in Node-RED based on an API specification to further enable their customers to rapidly develop their IoT solutions.

“I’m pleased to see the continued world wide usage of Node-RED increase with the support of companies like Hitachi,” said Nick O’Leary, IBM Developer Advocate and Node-Red creator. “When I started this project it was to simply help clients do prototypes faster, and now it has grown to be a tool used around the world.”

Hitachi’s contributions to open source, and specifically their recent contributions to the open JavaScript ecosystem are growing. They are now one of the top contributors to the Node-RED project and we are excited to see what comes from them next! Thank you Hitachi for your efforts in true long-term sustainability for the JavaScript ecosystem.

For more information about the JS Foundation visit https://js.foundation, follow @the_jsf on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter below.