The latest 0.16 release of the open-source IoT power tool, Node-RED, now includes the ability to query and transform its JSON payloads using the JSONata expression language.

Node-RED has gained wide adoption amongst the IoT community owing to its simple visual programming model, allowing data flows to be wired together and configured graphically. This enables its users to connect sensors to backend databases, hook into social media, create html dashboards, all without writing a line of code. When the user wants to modify the data, then a ‘function node’ is available to add custom code. Here is where the underlying JavaScript engine shows through. The user must write low-level JavaScript code to make this work. Very powerful, but not so accessible to non-programmers.

The latest release makes this substantially easier with the introduction of the ‘expression’ option on two of the most commonly used nodes – ‘change’ and ‘switch’. These nodes can now be configured with the powerful and easy to learn expression syntax, JSONata, that supports sophisticated data queries and modification.

JSONata is an open-source project developed by IBM that provides simple yet highly capable query language for JSON data.

JSONata is also core to the graphical mapping engine in IBM Cloud App Connect which is a radically easy to use integration tool that connects your apps both in cloud and on-premises. App Connect is built largely from open source technologies like Node, loopback, Kafka and JSONata. It provides a rich set of out-of-the-box connectors to industry leading SaaS and enterprise applications and uses JSONata to provide the expression syntax that allows users to create sophisticated transformation logic to simplify automation of manual tasks.

Visit appconnect.ibmcloud.com, jsonata.org and nodered.org to find out more.