Here at Losant, we give you the best tools to enable you to build scalable, production-ready IoT applications. The most loved tool, and my personal favorite, is the Visual Workflow Engine. Within Losant, Workflows allow you to perform stream processing of IoT data, real-time notifications and alerting, integrations to third-party services, and bi-directional device communication — and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Because it's very visual, building a workflow is super easy if you don't have a programming or engineering background. On the other hand, if you are familiar with programming, the Workflow Engine contains more advanced features to allow you to be dangerous.
To help you learn faster, master building workflows, and explore the corners of the Workflow Engine, we created the Workflow Lab.
What is The Workflow Lab?
The Losant Workflow Lab is an interactive tool that provides a set of challenges to solve using the Workflow Engine. The Workflow Lab is intended to be used by both new and experienced users. The Lab was inspired by tools like Project Euler and HackerRank, which help individuals learn to code through example problems and tests.
Here is what a test in the Workflow Lab looks like:
For each test, your job is to build an Application Workflow that performs the test logic. In the test above, the Lab will send your workflow:
{
"string1": "Hello",
"string2": " World"
}
And expect it to return the following:
{
"result": "Hello World"
}
Overall, the Workflow Lab is broken into test suites which contain individual tests. Each suite in the Workflow Lab covers a specific theme. For example, in the Math Suite, you'll find an array of math-related questions.
The nice thing is, the Lab doesn’t use any hidden functionality to send and receive data from your workflow. Behind the scenes, it simply uses Webhooks. The test input is sent to your Workflow as JSON in body of the webhook. After your Workflow responds to the webhook the Workflow Lab parses the response as the test output.
There is so much more to explore. I hope you're ready to get started building Workflows for the Workflow Lab. You should begin by taking a look at the Workflow Lab Overview Doc. It provides a deeper dive into how the Lab works and walks you through solving a problem.
We hope you enjoy the Workflow Lab. If you have any questions, we created a category in the Losant Forums just for the Workflow Lab. We would love to hear your feedback. If there is anything we can do to make the tool better for you let us know. Happy learning! :)