Node-RED is built on sending messages from one node to the next. While there are some recommended best practices, it is really a wide-open system giving users freedom on how to structure the relationship between their nodes. As for the messages, they are JavaScript objects and there's a convention to structuring them within a Node-RED project. While I can always fall back to writing JavaScript to work with messages, for the most part I don't have to. Between the Cookbook and the Best Practices document, there are many methods to accomplish some commodity programming flow control tasks without dropping to a JavaScript function node.

But the built-in nodes have limited data manipulation capabilities. So I thought anything that requires actual data manipulation requires dropping to code. I was pleasantly surprised to find I was wrong: simple text changes and similar manipulation can be done without dropping to a JavaScript function node, they can be done with a JavaScript-based query and transformation language called JSONata.

JSONata appears to be an independent project not directly related to Node-RED, but it fits in very well with how Node-RED works and thus widely supported by many property fields of nodes. Any JavaScript string or data manipulation that could fit within a line or two of code can probably be expressed in JSOSNata, and thus accomplished directly in a standard Node-RED field without requiring dragging in a fully fledged JavaScript function node.

JSONata is yet another novelty in my exploration of Node-RED. I can vaguely sense this can be tremendously powerful, and I look forward to experimenting with this capability for future projects. But there's another technically-not-core Node-RED feature that I will definitely be using, and that is the Node-RED Dashboard.