Node.js Paris Community Highlights ‘Internet of Things’ Potential

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Posted by Frédéric Aatz
Director of Interoperability, Microsoft France

Earlier this month, Node supporters convened for a Node.js Paris community meetup, and it was great to see how Node is supporting the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), through creation of APIs that can connect devices to data.

Node is being tapped for IoT because it’s great for getting projects done quickly, leveraging broad knowledge of JavaScript and scaling for massive concurrency needed for mobile and IoT devices.

Issac Roth, CEO of StrongLoop and one of the major contributors to the Node.js core and module ecosystem, highlighted one of the most popular scenarios for Node – creating REST APIs for mobile apps and IoT devices. He demonstrated an open source framework called LoopBack and constructed a mobile REST API in minutes, including security and offline sync.

Microsoft’s Stéphane Goudeau demonstrated how he built a Node.js IoT application prototype that displays real time temperature and humidity data graphs on Azure website with notification alerts pushed on a Windows Phone. He explained that Node.js is one of the reference technologies for the development of these services due to its natively asynchronous design, the richness of its modules ecosystem, and the ability for developers to leverage their existing skills in JavaScript. You can get the full recap on Stéphane’s blog (in French, but Bing translator can help out) and the sample code is published on github.

The Node.js Paris community is fueled by two strong leaders -- Quentin Raynaud and Etienne Folio. It was great to see the energy behind the event, on stage and late at night, from these two entrepreneurs. Thanks to their dedication and open collaboration, Microsoft was able to host this Node community for the second time.

To learn more about the community and how to get involved, visit https://www.nodejsparis.fr/.

Check out Microsoft Azure’s Node.js Development Center for the SDK, tutorials and resources.