Two kinds of end-user programming tool have been doing the rounds recently. Both run in the browser and each takes a building block approach to creating useful software functions.

Pipes, which comes from the Brickhouse product incubator within Yahoo, provides a promising way to merge, filter and manipulate a collection of incoming RSS feeds and output the result as a single feed.

Teqlo, on the other hand, provides a way to join different software “widgets” so that information flows automatically between them. You could, for example, make a simple RSS aggregator by joining a feed widget to a feed reader widget.

Both Pipes and Teqlo are hosted and still in beta. Pipes is the more developed, but both are undergoing continuous revision in the light of user feedback. They both need more building blocks although each can be used as it stands. IWR is looking at them because they are among the first to bring the user into the application development equation without requiring programming skills.

Only time will tell whether they end up being the frontrunners in data and application mashups. Pipes has a freebie air to it, while Teqlo comes across as more businesslike. They are free to use right now, but don’t be fooled: software services such as this won’t survive unless they pay the rent. Users pay in the form of attention, personal details, help or money, sometimes moving from one form of payment to another as their needs change.

Pipes
A Yahoo Pipe accepts user input and a number of RSS feeds which it then filters, shapes and spits out as a new RSS feed. The filtering follows a set of rules that you create by dragging and dropping function boxes into the work area, or “canvas”, and joining them together with what look like blue pipes, hence the name (which is also a nod to the pipe function in Unix).

User inputs appear as a form with text boxes for each value. They might include feed names, search terms, number of output feeds, dates, and so on. Feeds can come direct from a feed URL or from searches built into the Pipes system. Not surprisingly, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Local and Flickr (another Yahoo property) loom large here. Goods and services locator Google Base is also listed.

The number of pre-built search functions is restricted, although you can fairly easily add your own if you already have Technorati watchlists or know how to construct a search URL for your favourite search engine, providing it can output results as RSS. Some well-known ones can’t.

Once your incoming feeds arrive at a function box you can look inside using the debug area at the foot of the screen, which displays each feed item as a collapsed outline. Expanding it reveals all the XML field names and their contents. This lets you see exactly what’s coming through inside the feeds, and it becomes even more useful when you start merging feeds and performing filtering actions on them.

It’s important because RSS feeds are not all the same. They contain different fields, and information is not always in the field or the format you expect.

You can split an incoming feed into duplicate processing streams and subsequently consolidate them with the union command. You can copy and rename elements within the feed, change the content and add information. But it’s early days and some manipulation functions are not yet available. Others, such as Content Analysis, look intriguing, although this particular function promises much but delivers only the crudest of analysis.

The BabelFish translation is what you’ve come to expect from this service: useful for reading foreign language documents but less so for publishing them. The regular expression engine is excellent for transforming fields from one format to another. Regular expressions appear intimidating to the uninitiated, but they’re worth learning for the flexibility they give you.

There’s more, of course, but why not visit pipes.yahoo.com and look at some of the published Pipes yourself. You can not only run them, but, if you’re signed in, you can see how each was made.

Teqlo
While Pipes is all about manipulating RSS feeds, Teqlo sets out to enable different widgets to work together. If, for example, you have some eBay search results coming in, you can feed them straight over to a mapping program and pinpoint where the sellers live. The eBay service is quite separate from, say, Google Map, and Teqlo takes care of all the hard work of calling on the widget services and passing the results between the modules.

Like Pipes, Teqlo offers a set of widgets that can be dragged onto the screen canvas. But Teqlo applications are much more visible to the ultimate user, so the tool lets you work with layouts and colours, to mirror your intranet style, for example. You can even have multiple canvases for different screens within the application.

To make most things happen in Teqlo, you need at least two widgets. The company is busy building a foundation catalogue, but expects to add independently developed widgets as well. Some will be free, others for rent and, no doubt, others will carry advertisements as their form of payment. If this widget economy takes off, it could lead to much deeper functionality than exists at present.

At the time of writing, the widget catalogue contains 13 major items, including eBay search, five Google functions, a YouTube viewer, RSS feed and reader and some business contact items. Some of these are umbrella terms for a collection of widgets. Google Gadget, for example, contains eight popular functions, one of which can select any of over 4,000 Google Gadgets for inclusion in your page.

The more interesting items are those that trigger searches, bring back the results, then feed them to other widgets for further interpretation. For example, the RSS feed passes its results to the feed reader, which displays the feeds and the text for the currently selected item. This could be linked to an emailer to send the feed, or extracts of it, with the user’s own comments, off to the recipient of choice. Many blogging services accept email as input, so you could use Teqlo to create a simple blogging application.

At the time of writing, the definitions of “actions” and “reactions” was done by selecting the elements from drop-down menus, six in all. An action might be “select an item in a list”, the reaction might be “plot the location on a map”. Teqlo recently demonstrated a pre-beta that reduced this definition effort to a simple drag-and-drop exercise. The drop-down menus are still there for people who prefer it.

One Teqlo developer built a Pipe to collect information about traffic accidents in the San Francisco Bay Area, using the responses to access a Google Map. A watcher widget called the Pipe periodically and only reacted if an accident occurred on the user’s route home.

The way forward
Both of these services are in the early stages of development. While Pipes is about mashing up data feeds, Teqlo is trying to orchestrate the inputs and outputs of widgets that were never designed to work together. In the longer term, if successful, Teqlo is likely to be used to build complete applications, whereas Pipes looks as if it will be one more element in the Yahoo product family.

Each company provides its services through the browser. Both are good with Firefox. Pipes works with Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, Webkit and Safari, in that order of preference. Teqlo is Firefox 2 only at the time of writing, with IE7 on its way.

The idea behind both services is that users should be able to build “mashup” applications without recourse to the IT department. But, if you cannot sign up for externally hosted web services, then you will be out of luck.