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

Introducing nodes - the server side JavaScript runtime

For anyone who is familiar with basic HTML development, JavaScript is a language restricted to the browser. For a long time, this was indeed the case, until 2009, when the first release of Node.js was written.

Node.js is a runtime for JavaScript, based on Chrome V8 engine, which allows JavaScript to run outside the browser. This gives it huge potential to do things it was never able to do inside the browser, such as:

  • Reading and writing files on the system
  • Binding to a port and running a server
  • Making native system calls and interacting with other processes

We are eventually going to make use of all three of these functions to build our final application. Node has gained huge popularity both in the Enterprise and the IoT space because of its event-driven and non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient...