RE: Sketching in Hardware 2013: Physical Computing with JavaScript

shabaz — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 17:57:05 GMT

Great slides!

Initially in the past I had been confused, because since Javascript runs on the browser, (and I hadn't heard of Node.js) I was a little confused and had thought that I'd need a browser opened on the BBB to make use of bonescript, so I'd ignored it all.

Now it's much clearer that this is the Javascript engine, but doesn't need a browser to run in. It's very cool, since Javascript is a fairly friendly language (in the past, for what little I've done, I've relied on javascript libraries heavily to make sure that it works consistently across browsers, but I'm sure that has changed now - or at least is a non-issue in this case, since there is only one Node.js engine).

It's also extremely powerful that you can use other existing js libraries! That sounds pretty amazing. I can't wait to try that out. And create http based UIs without needing Apache and PHP.

Possibly this can all be done with Python too (I don't know) but I'm convinced js+bonescript is worth paying a lot of attention to, to rapidly develop applications - and in a language that is literally designed for the web, so lots of knowledge reuse for those who will one day want to create web apps.

The ideal scenario for some apps could be PRU<->C/C++ and then IPC with Node.js javascript (and bonescript for any direct hw control) for the http based UI.

Also, I wonder how performance compares with a typical desktop browser running JS.