Ask HN: What equals to unix pipes in the web world?

2 points by hilti ↗ HN
I like the simple but powerful concept of unix pipes. Is there anything equal for the web world? If not, wouldn't it be worth to think about or even develop it?

2 comments

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It's no longer available but Yahoo used to run a service called Yahoo Pipes that did exactly this - you could take arbitrary APIs and wire them up together to do things. It was very cool. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo%21_Pipes I guess the spiritual successor would be something like IFTTT or Zapier.
There's a few "glue" services like [Huginn](https://github.com/cantino/huginn) or IFTTT, but we really should be able to use unix pipes on the web with just curl. Sadly, people have taken to reinventing standard REST APIs for every new project, rather than copying from successful models like CouchDB... So you'll have to read the docs of every service you interact with. :(