Developing REST APIs using Node-red for a web application

General
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I know that Node-red can be used to create and expose REST APIs easily. It uses nodejs and express internally to expose the REST services.

I am planning to develop a node-red and mongodb backed REST APIs for a commercial web application which processes some sensor data and provide some analytical dashboards. Some of them are summary html views, graphs and paginated html report views with various filtering criteria.

In comparison to using nodejs and express from the scratch for this work,

  1. Are there any known limitations in using node-red as a REST back-end?

  2. Is there a performance or scalability issues I should be careful if I select node-red for this? (The web application is suppose to scale to 1000 users initially and planning to host in AWS as Paas or in a docker environment)

1 Like
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Hi @knolleary,

Would you be able to share any thoughts around this?

Regards,
Kushan

3

You will have to evaluate it according to your own requirements.

Node-RED can absolutely be used for creating a REST back-end. You can scale it just as any node.js application. But you do need to think carefully about how you manage updates to the production instances - you wouldn't want them to expose the editor to be edited directly.

If you also want to provide dashboards via Node-RED, what are you going to use to build them? Node-RED Dashboard doesn't provide multi-user dashboards, so you'd have to build something yourself, perhaps with UIBuilder. Again, it depends on your requirements.

4

Thank you for your valuable feedback.

I have planned to manage the updates to the application only via the flow.json file with GIT not via the editor.

I'm already aware of the the limitation of node-red dashboard. I would most probably use reactjs for front-end.

Regards,
Kushan

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