I tried Reactor before leaving Vera, was not impressed. A much easier to use solution in my opinion would be to use Node Red
Real Time Rule Updates is Rule Machines old time way of doing things, many versions have come since the infancy. And you can currently do IF/Then rules very easily.
The community is robust enough to cover my needs. I started writing apps and drivers with no prior knowledge of how to do so. I struggled for maybe a week, then once I had the basics down it was pretty darn easy. If I had a question I could ask the community and usually got a response in a few minutes. For general not knowing what I don't know, I found looking at what other users were doing in their code to help more than what I could glean from some docs.
To Hubitat's creators' credit, there is less innate need for strong documentation of most features, insofar as very little is left "free form" for the basic user. No Lua code to enter, no parameters to tweak, no figuring out how to generate logs or set special modes or detect Z-Wave engine restarts (remember those?).
In brief, HE did the right thing by hard-coding almost everything at the Rule Machine level, with all of its click-and-pick creation / editing interface. In that sense, the lack of docs (and comparative silence on the subject) is a plus, not a minus.
True, the Vera restarts and lack of an easy-to-use rule management system are annoying. I have had no problems with my Veraplus – no crashes, firmware problems, devices inclusions - no problems with any kind. I suppose I could state the white space on the webpages is also annoying.
The Vera ecosystem is in need of a rewrite. Every system needs to be written to take advantage of new technology. Windows 10/11 shares no code from the first usable version of Windows NT v3.51 because it is continually rewritten. The designers of HE evaluated home automation systems and included the desirable features and (hopefully) modified the undesirable features. At some point, HE will need to be rewritten.
Accurate and useful documentation is required in every system. It empowers the novice to succeed and become experienced, and the experienced to stretch the bounds of the system for future improvements.
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