One of the most useful reasons for providing your Raspberry Pi with a REST API is to expose its inputs and outputs to a web client (on any iPhone, laptop or desktop PC anywhere in the world) for remote monitoring and/or control. This is part 1 of a 2 part blog showing how to implement a REST API in JavaScript.
In this third part of our exercise, we’re going to use the primary AWS EC2 instance on which we installed Node in Part 1, and the database EC2 Instance we set up in Part 2, as the platform for building a simple web application server. We are going to code that web server in Javascript, using Node together with the Express and Mongoose Node library packages.
In Part 1, we installed Node on an EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this part 2 of the series, we’re going to add a second instance running the popular MongoDB database.
In this three-part exercise, we’re going to build a web application using Javascript on both the client and server side, using Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-hosting infrastructure and the Node.JS framework.
What we’re going to do first is install Node on an Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) virtual server instance provided by Amazon Web Services. In the following parts of this series, we’ll add a MongoDB database instance, and develop a simple server-side web application in Javascript using the Express framework and the Mongoose library for accessing our database.
I’ve been using Node.JS as the backend framework for building single-page web apps recently. On top of providing the advantage of an asynchronous, event-based programming model on the backend, it means I can code in Javascript on both the frontend and the backend again – just like in the good old days coding client-server applications in C.
And so when I come up with an application where I want to use my Raspberry Pi as a micro web server, but one that needs more than the ability to serve static webpages, I right away think of Node.
Robert Drummond 