Imagine you could have your favorite Knime workflow ready at your fingertip, crunching data without even starting Knime, searching your workspace and starting it.
I’d like to introduce you to Knime Droplets. An exported mini version of Knime and your workflow, only containing the absolute necessary.
Creat a workflow, export as a droplet and place it on your desktop, link it in quick access or via a shortcut. Drag and drop an Excel file on it to work it‘s magic.
The concept is borrowed from Adobe Photoshop and I came to the realization that this would be a game changer while thinking about new way to engage with Knime, incorporating it into my daily routine to increase efficiency.
A Photoshop droplet is an app for batch processing. You first record a Photoshop action for your repetitive task, then export that and reise the actions without starting Photoshop.
Imagine a “slim” GUI (cli is welcome too but the majority of Knime users still rely on GUI):
you can drag and drop a Knime Workflow into
it resolves input variables or credentials, or an environment (production, staging, dev) which has variables available to be consumed (compare e.g. Yaak - and opensource replacement for Postman)
the variables and credentials are encrypted and managed locally
you can run it adhoc or schedule it (best case obviously if error log, notifications, retries at some point)
trying to run it, the necessary dependencies (internal ones only, not customs stuff like “external jdbc drivers) are loaded and resolved, as managers like UV for python do
all converted to Word files.