In today’s modern world, we’re seeing an increasing number of Internet-enabled devices; a movement referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT).
Along with consumer devices such as refrigerators, lights, alarms, door locks, coffee machines, and more, enterprises are also deploying more IoT devices, such as city-wide smart street lighting, security systems, various types of field sensors, health monitoring devices, and robots, just to name a few. It’s easy to see how pervasive IoT devices are quickly becoming.
The influx of IoT devices presents an unprecedented challenge for enterprise environments: businesses are more frequently faced with the task of aggregating, visualizing, and interacting with a variety of different data sources using a dashboard. Luckily, many IoT devices feature programmable APIs, enabling enterprises to hook up some kind of front-end to them.
Another challenge comes from the use of an ever-growing range of devices in our day-to-day jobs, including smartphones, tablets, laptops (which may also feature touch screens), and desktops, all of which run different operating systems, making it difficult to write one app that runs on all form factors and platforms.
All of these different platform configurations have something in common though: each device features a web browser, or the ability to render web content inside a web view. This web browser or web view makes it easy to deploy web applications across different devices and form factors. When building a web application, JavaScript is a logical choice for a development framework, especially because it tops the list of languages used in GitHub’s active repositories (see http://githut.info and https://octoverse.github.com). Plus, back in 2014, Developer Economics also stated that HTML5 was the most widely used technology by developers – 42 percent.
By using a complete JavaScript-based application framework, developers can leverage a variety of widgets to build a flexible and powerful user interface that works across all device types and screen sizes, while at the same time structuring code efficiently with the help of common design patterns like MVC or MVVM.
Rather than mixing and matching components and libraries from different vendors, complete JavaScript frameworks provide a one-stop-shop: all widgets and tooling are provided and supported by the vendor. You don’t have to build and maintain your own framework and source components and pieces from multiple vendors and open source projects – all of which present their own risks, especially for line-of-business applications. Some JavaScript frameworks empower developers to interact with a wide variety of IoT devices through RESTful-based APIs, and use custom widgets to present the data.
As IoT devices become more prevalent in the enterprise, it’s imperative that enterprises have access to an easy and cost effective way to interact with these devices. There is a large, growing developer pool out there with infinite expertise in web-based technologies. Tapping into this is the easiest mechanism by far to write an app once and deploy everywhere, while also bringing time and cost savings to your business – so why wait?
Contributed by: Daniel Gallo, Sales Engineer at Sencha. Dan provides pre-sales technical assistance on the Sencha product line. He has more than 9 years of experience developing innovative, web-based applications using a variety of technologies. Dan specializes in ASP.NET C# and JavaScript. Prior to joining Sencha in early 2012, Dan worked at BMT Defence Services as a Senior Systems Analyst.
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