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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Dear Apache NiFi people: almost every technology featured on HN could be described as "an easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data." Please consider using a tagline that will tell people something about your project. E.g., intended audience, chosen problem space, desired benefit.

You'll note that a lot of the discussion here is, "What is it? Is it like X? Is it good for X?" Those are great questions to answer on the home page.

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I find the first paragraph of the User Guide a bit better than the main page of the NiFi website:

Apache NiFi is a dataflow system based on the concepts of flow-based programming. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic. NiFi has a web-based user interface for design, control, feedback, and monitoring of dataflows. It is highly configurable along several dimensions of quality of service, such as loss-tolerant versus guaranteed delivery, low latency versus high throughput, and priority-based queuing. NiFi provides fine-grained data provenance for all data received, forked, joined cloned, modified, sent, and ultimately dropped upon reaching its configured end-state.

Link to inventors site about FBP:

http://jpaulmorrison.com/fbp

... and of course:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming

> almost every technology featured on HN could be described as "an easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data."

Really? I feel like it's more: "usable, powerful and reliable: choose one ... if you're lucky".

The point is that it doesn't say anything about what it does. A programming language could be described as a "easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data." It processes and distributes data? That just sounds like a computer.

Well, there's "could be described as" and then "really is". But since this is their home page, I'm willing to let them put their best foot forward.

they ought to market it as a souped up version of yahoo pipes (e.g., it's got auditing).

Or as an open-source version of enterprise tools like EDIFECS XEngine -- I think that's more exact, but which reference is more useful probably depends on who you are marketing it to.

for the discovery part of the pharma industry, open source version of pipeline pilot

http://accelrys.com/products/collaborative-science/biovia-pi...

We already had Knime, but that is Java-based and I believe it only has a desktop interface ( http://tech.knime.org/getting-started )

What do you mean by auditing?

Probably their Data Provenance, which tracks everything that happened to the data.

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NIFI/Persistent+...

I find it kind of interesting that bloberdoo's comment[1], voted to the bottom, is substantially identical to this one here at the top.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192171

Delivery matters, green account calling names is going to be downvoted to hell even if it has other good content.

What is the significance of a green account?

It means they are a newly signed up account.

I think it's identical in concern, but substantially different in both manner and content. Aside from his obvious abusive behavior, I gave specific suggestions for ways to address the issue.

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