The internet has affected every sphere of our lives and nearly every person is dependent on it in one way or the other. Organizations are using the Internet as a powerful communication medium that helps them extend their geographical reach. Every organization wants to make its presence felt in cyberspace so that its products and services can be conveniently utilized by the customer. More and more customers are relying on the internet to utilize services provided by hospitals, universities, airports, banks, retailers, hotels, utility service providers and logistics companies. Enterprises have designed their websites in a way that the customer can buy products within the comfort of their homes. Now, organizations are all poised to harness the power of smart sensors and technologies embedded in the user devices like mobile phones and other consumer durables. Internet of Things (IoT) or the inter-networking of smart devices will be playing a key role in taking eCommerce to the next level.
IoT will change web development
Every person with a smartphone has experienced IoT at some point or the other. For instance, the auto-notification system that sends messages based on a person’s mobile phone location can be considered a most basic application of IoT. Another basic application is the auto-updating of a business database on the basis of movement of RFID-tagged assets within the company premises. In the near future, businesses will be seen using a combination of sensor and wireless technologies to track the customer’s buying behavior. On the other hand, customers will use IoT technologies to automatically avail customized products and personalized services. Use of sensors and analytics will enable people to track their health as well as control their home appliances. The complex communication system will drastically change the process of web development. Out of the large number of things impacted by IoT, web designing will be one of the key areas that will be radically affected by the future developments.
IoT and User Interfaces
The successful implementation of any IoT system depends on two key elements: the user interface and the user experience. Since, the data acquired from the interaction between the devices will be accessible on a device screen, web designers will be required to build great user interfaces. Web designers will need to design user interfaces for a large number of networked devices with different screen sizes and resolutions. Moreover, these devices will be running on different platforms. It becomes imperative that web designers enhance the user experience by designing responsive user interface based on the user devices and environments. Designers are already developing responsive websites for mobile devices. In the future, they will need to design responsive interfaces for other types of devices that form the IoT.
Web Designing will become complex
With the advent of IoT, the design will become more complex because users will be primarily using the front-end interface to communicate with other IoT devices like cameras, sensors and other smart devices. Websites will need to have the complex ability to communicate with the backend databases that store the personalized data obtained from IoT devices. Moreover, website design will need to speed up page load and transmission time as the complex network of IoT devices might cause delays. Future requirements stipulate that web designers use a powerful language that not only to build a dynamic interface in the front-end but also enables users to communicate with IoT devices in the backend. All experts unanimously agree that JavaScript has the potential to address the web designing challenges posed by IoT.
JavaScript for IoT
A strong case can be made in favor of using JavaScript to develop interfaces for IoT applications. This is because it is a mature language that has earned the status of the most popular programming language to create dynamic web pages. There is a huge and thriving JavaScript community which is growing as new frontend developers are adopting JavaScript as the defacto language to develop dynamic websites. Since JavaScript is an open standard language, developers can come up with their own flavor of JavaScript. Even though frontend developers have began to use CoffeeScript and TypeScript, it is difficult to displace JavaScript as the most commonly used programming language. JavaScript codebase is very stable and there are a number of quality tools and testing frameworks that are available to ensure that the code meets highest standards. JHint and Mocha are popularly used tools that can also be used even with IoT systems. JavaScript’s other big advantage is that it provides a syntax that helps the user frontend interface to talk to a large number of data sources having different formats. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data-interchange format that is parsed by a middleware connector to ensure interoperability between the complex IoT systems.
JavaScript for Real Time IoT Applications
Development of user interface for real-time IoT applications will be, without doubt, the biggest benefit of using JavaScript for frontend development. JQuery and Socket.IO are two JavaScript libraries that are used to develop real time applications and dashboards. JQuery is particularly used along with HTML and CSS to deploy AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a polling technique to constantly update data on the web page. Moreover, there are a number of JQuery plug-in modules that are available to develop responsive web pages. It is important to note that JavaScript is also used as server-side programming language. A framework called as Node.js is used to server-side applications in JavaScript language. Today, cloud-based IoT platforms like IBM Watson have stipulated the use of JavaScript for developing IoT applications.
JavaScript is here to stay
We live in an era where the internet has empowered both, businesses and customers, to make the most of the digital data pulled from various sources and smart devices. The real value of the data can only be realized when the end-user are able to communicate with various devices in a convenient way. Usability will be the key factor that will ensure the success of an IoT application. An excellent user experience can only be ensured by an effective frontend programming language, which not only helps to design a truly responsive interface but which will make to possible for the end user to access the multitude of databases in the backend. Considering its ubiquity and capabilities, JavaScript is bound to emerge as a preferred web-designing language for enabling IoT applications.
