Interesting - Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As Database
Alex Iskold over at Read/Write Web has an interesting take on Yahoo Pipes. He sees a parallel between the relational databases in the 90’s and the web of today. Databases have fields and views that can be queried and re-mixed to display any result you are looking for. Isn’t that what the web is? A vast repository of information just waiting to be queried and re-mixed to produce a specific result?
This is a screenshot provided by Alex. It represents various views of one database. For example, the ID is only in the database once but it is used in many views to provide specific information from the database.
In the same way, this article is on the web once but with Pipes it can be re-mixed with other articles and information to produce a specific output.
This all makes perfect sense to me. But I’m an old mainframe programmer who worked with databases, views and wrote programs to re-mix that information.
Of course the main difference here is that the information is not updated by Pipes - it is merely displayed in a specific output. BUT, as the information is updated, it is also updated in your Pipe.
Does this make Pipes any easier to understand?
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