Re: Programmatic and security models for IoT

I’m also tracking js, but I’m not a huge fan of such poor typing - Flow seems to be an approach to addressing this.
I like your anecdotes of adopting the technologies.

Thanks for those links. Like many that I’ve seen, there seems to be an emphasis on ‘happy path’ coding. IoT is a really hostile compute environment:
- connections are very flakey
- hardware drivers are poor quality
- there is no release management
- code runs unattended

And at the same time, I believe, most of the value arises when you combine the Things using the Internet and some Compute Nodes.

The economics of this are hard to spot: does the low entry cost of JS for devs trump the expected better robustness of a distributed E application? Or is the route to value through non-composition and bespoke apps per each device type, with expensive (>$20 each) devices (this seems to be the way that SmartThings is approaching the problem, although their approach of using eventual consistency is not good for controlling Things.)

Tim
> SES (Secure EcmaScript) seems more promising, to me.
> 
> http://code.google.com/p/es-lab/
> 
> Using ocap discipline in javascript is really quite nice, as I
> recently (re?)discovered. I work with this clinical data warehouse
> query system (https://www.i2b2.org/) that has html/css/js/ajax
> plug-ins. I made a couple plug-ins by copying an existing plug-in and
> tweaking it. I was having trouble managing simple typos, so I tried
> typescript. Then I used typescript class stuff, with implementation
> inheritance, to factor out some common code between two plug-ins. I
> couldn't reconcile typescript modules with the i2b2 plug-in loader; I
> had to edit the compiled output each time. I decided that wasn't worth
> the bother and just started maintaining the javascript. I set it aside
> for a few months and then came back to it and realized I had created a
> monster.
> 
> Then I got a chance to start fresh on another plugin
> (https://bitbucket.org/DanC/cohorttops ). My colleague had i2b2
> running on his laptop, so I used ssh and a Makefile to push my code
> over there for testing as I developed it. When he shut down for the
> day, I finally came to my senses and realized that if I used ocap
> discipline, I could unit test my code without the whole i2b2 app
> server and database environment. So I factored out all the sources of
> authority and set up doctest.js. Ah... so much nicer!
> 
> (Aside: I'm completely addicted to doctest; I'm starting to look at
> moving on from python, and I started to enjoy scala a bit, but every
> time I wrote a test description, I kept grumbling "why do I have to
> write this twice: once in my test descriptions and once in my
> documentation?" doctest and E's updoc are pretty much the same idea.
> http://doctestjs.org/ applies the same technique to JavaScript.
> Yummy.)
> 
> Not only that, but the same style of code gets along great with the
> flow static analyzer from some facebook engineers.
> http://flowtype.org/
> 
> Back when the node.js platform was building, I kept hoping ocap
> supporters would influence it, but I guess none of us found the time.
> There's not much chance to influence the basic fs API and such now,
> but it's still feasible to get a lot of benefit from ocap discipline
> in javascript, both on the server side and the browser side.
> 
> And now IoT is an emerging thing, and they're going after developers
> via javascript...
> 
> First Look: Javascript Microcontrollers for Web Developers
> February 4th, 2013 8:56 am
> http://makezine.com/magazine/first-look-javascript-micro-controllers-for-web-developers/
> 
> "DeviceJS is a distributed system. " --
> http://devicejs.org/blog/post/how-it-works
> 
> IoT is just screaming out for robust composition with capabilities and
> promises. I think deploying SES in that context is pretty promising.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Dan Connolly
> http://www.madmode.com/
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