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.

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Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started on the Raspberry Pi
Getting Started on the Raspberry Pi
The Internet of Things
A brief look at our application
Setting up our Raspberry Pi
Remote access
Summary
2
Getting Up-and-Running with Web Development on the Raspberry Pi
Getting Up-and-Running with Web Development on the Raspberry Pi
The network
The web development stack
Summary
3
Running a Node Server on the Pi
Running a Node Server on the Pi
Introducing nodes - the server side JavaScript runtime
Running our first node program
Summary
4
Extracting Information from the GPIO Pins
Extracting Information from the GPIO Pins
The GPIO pins on the Pi
The pin as a standalone component
Fine-tuning our control - using the GPIO command-line tools
The DHT11 sensor
Reading from the sensor
Summary
5
Retrieving Sensor Readings from the Server
Retrieving Sensor Readings from the Server
Understanding how our node process takes readings
Modifying our server code to show sensor readings
Optimizing our server
Summary
6
Creating a Web Page to Display Sensor Data
Creating a Web Page to Display Sensor Data
Extending our application
Building the UI's functionality
Visually enhancing the UI
Summary
7
Enhancing Our UI - Using Interactive Charts
Enhancing Our UI - Using Interactive Charts
Considerations when implementing complex features
Introducing Chart.js
Making the server response data-friendly
Integrating sensor data into our charts
Summary
8
SQLite - The Fast and Portable Database
SQLite - The Fast and Portable Database
Picking the correct tool for the job
Creating the temperature and humidity tables
Running CRUD operations
Aggregations
Summary
9
Integrating SQLite into Our Application
Integrating SQLite into Our Application
Interfacing SQLite with node
Running queries with node
Making our database module
Integrating the database module into our server application
Adding new features - the ability to view readings from a custom time period
Summary
10
Making our Application Real Time with Web Sockets
Making our Application Real Time with Web Sockets
Web sockets
Implementing web sockets in our application
Creating our socket implementation in our application server
Client-side implementation
Summary
11
Deploying our application to Firebase
Deploying our application to Firebase
The Firebase platform
Migrating to Firebase
Creating your first Firebase application
Migrating the frontend assets
Adding the Realtime Database
Enabling access to the Firebase Database
Adding listeners to the client-side script
Summary
12
Using Firebase APIs to Update Our Application
Using Firebase APIs to Update Our Application
Application server versus application process
Securing our application
The application process architecture
Implementing the application process
Summary

Making the server response data-friendly

Our server is currently returning HTML responses. A humidity of 38% will give us this response:

    <strong>38</strong>

While this works for our current setup, it is not ideal for when we need raw data, like we do now for making our charts. It is far easier to convert raw data to HTML as opposed to doing the opposite, so we can make our sensor displays compatible for raw data as well.

The most popular standard for data interchange, and one that is almost universal now, is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). JSON is a very simple data interchange specification that is used to serialize data that is exchanged between applications. As we have been programming in JavaScript the whole time, JSON should feel very familiar to us.

In this section, we will be modifying our application server to return JSON responses, as opposed to the...

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