Book Image

Full Stack Web Development with Raspberry Pi 3

By : Soham Kamani
Book Image

Full Stack Web Development with Raspberry Pi 3

By: Soham Kamani

Overview of this book

Modern web technology and portable computing together have enabled huge advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) space,as well as in areas such as machine learning and big data. The Raspberry Pi is a very popular portable computer for running full stack web applications. This book will empower you to master this rapidly evolving technology to develop complex web applications and interfaces. This book starts by familiarizing you with the various components that make up the web development stack and that will integrate into your Raspberry Pi-powered web applications. It also introduces the Raspberry Pi computer and teach you how to get up and running with a brand new one. Next, this book introduces you to the different kinds of sensor you’ll use to make your applications; using these skills, you will be able to create full stack web applications and make them available to users via a web interface. Later, this book will also teach you how to build interactive web applications using JavaScript and HTML5 for the visual representation of sensor data. Finally, this book will teach you how to use a SQLite database to store and retrieve sensor data from multiple Raspberry Pi computers. By the end of this book you will be able to create complex full stack web applications on the Raspberry Pi 3 and will have improved your application’s performance and usability.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
2
Getting Up-and-Running with Web Development on the Raspberry Pi

Optimizing our server

So it looks like we got our server working with the sensor readings and everything... great! However, there are a few issues with our implementation that we need to handle. Looking at the server code from the previous example, we can note the following points:

  • We are repeating a lot of code; not only does this make our code look bad, but it also makes it less malleable. What if we want to change our sensor pin number from 4 to 6? We need to change the code in two places. Even worse, what if we decide to change the sensor or even the way in which we get sensor readings in the future?
  • We are making calls to the native library every time someone hits the API. This is fine when we are testing it on our local machine, but what if we had multiple users hitting our API at the same time? It is highly inefficient to make so many calls to the native library, especially...