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Remote Control With Node.js, React.js, and Raspberry Pi

The appearance of simple and cheap single-board computers (SBC) was a great promoting factor for the IoT world, providing a possibility to develop a wide range of control systems and devices for industrial, domestic, medical, and other usage. Now, everybody can develop stuff they need for their own needs, contribute to the development of public projects, and use products developed by others.

In this article, we are going to develop a control system to manage basic garden activities, like watering, illumination, etc. To make our application more flexible and expandable, we will develop it as a layered distributed system of loosely coupled components, communicating with each other via a standard (REST in our case) protocol. We will use well-known enterprise technologies, Node.js and React.js, and a Raspberry Pi Zero device for the sensor layer of our application.

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Consuming REST APIs With React.js

Recently we have experienced rapid growth of mobile, Internet-based communication. We have smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and other connected devices that create a need to serve appropriate content for each specific front-end profile. Also, the Internet is becoming available for new regions and social groups, constantly increasing web traffic. On the other side, users' computers and browsers, and JavaScript itself are getting more and more powerful, providing more possibilities for processing data on the web via the client-side. In this situation, the best solution can often be to send data as the response, instead of sending page content. That is, we don't need to reload the whole page on each request, but send back the corresponding data and let the client (front-end stuff) process the data.

We can develop a backend application exposing a remote API (usually based on the REST protocol) and a front-end (usually JavaScript) application, which communicates with the API and renders all the data on the device.