Thoughs and records on IoT, Web Sites and Microprocessors.

About Writing and Sharing

I have initiated and contributed to several projects and have been involved in various public projects and activities since 1999.

I personally believe in the sharing economy and think that having sharing platforms like GitHub, npmjs, Arduino and more is a great achievement of our times.

Give and Take - Create, Share, Search and Read.

AJAX

I began blogging in 1999, advocating for the implementation of web services that could be consumed by client-side JavaScript. At that time, the technology was known as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX.

Scripting became practical and robust with the release of IE5 by Microsoft in March 1999, which provided developers with more features and power, igniting the “browser wars”:

• Windows only
• Powerful but still slow JavaScript
• XML documents and XSL transformations

Calling server-side services was made possible using the XMLHttpRequest ActiveX object. Although JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) was not yet available, using XML to call services was a pioneering technology for building client-side web applications by separating frontend HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from backend functionality.

Do you remember the search box of google with immediate results and type ahead support in 2010 ?

Implementing services on a web server was achievable using server-side ASP.NET or JAVA and Don Box did a great job at this time defining a complete set of technologies around the XML standard especially the SOAP protocol.

Nice recordings: Don Box SOAP Song and Don Box on SOAP and WSE

At this time I participated in preparing the launch of ASP.NET in 2002 as a member of the Microsoft Quality Board for Developers.

During this period, my blogging activities and conference speeches began, driven by my interest in the future of the developer economy.

Today, using REST services has become mainstream for building web applications on the Internet. There is robust support for client-side frameworks that facilitate this architecture.

Micro Web Applications

As websites grow and become larger than ever before, it is important to find technologies that are safe to use for developing such large websites, including web application functionality.

One major topic here is that many teams must be empowered to work together. Building a website and the underlying technology stack needs to support continuous integration and independent deployment of fragments, known today as micro web applications.

On the other hand, some procedures that have been found as best practice in the last years. Are now called deprecated or even malicious. Because they provide open back doors for hacks like shared CDNs and cross side scripting attacks.

These are serious topics. especially for companies like The one I’m working for.

The significant advancement came in 2022 when Microsoft joined the development of the Chrome implementation. This move, along with the consensus among all browser developers to adhere to standards and ensure compatibility, marked a major milestone.

I admire the current advancements in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript technologies and the rapid progress being made.

Arduino

Using microprocessors and developping software on low level was one of my starting activity I started even before studying Computer science in Karlsruhe Germany And it is still my favorite hobby. Besides web technologies.

I have published several libraries For the Arduino ecosystem. That you can find on my Github Space. Github Space https://github.com/mathertel including the OneButton Library, RotaryEncoder Library, Arduino Radio Library, and DMXSerial libraries.

Today, both microprocessors and web technologies can be combined easily as microprocessors like ESP32 are powerful enough to host a web server.

Homeding

The HomeDing library I have created to get a complete but also adaptable solution ecosystem for building small IoT devices typically used in private environments. This is an Arduino library designed to build small IoT devices without the need for cloud services or a local central device.

This includes a web UI with a minimal footprint and RESTful Web Services from the device.

A huge documentation is available in the github pages of this project in https://homeding.github.io/.

Reading References

Much of my work was inspired by the work of others and I hop I inspire other people as well. In many posts and documentations you will find the See also chapter with the good references I found.