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Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
@creationix
The web service idea works fairly well and is what I did for my talk in Paris
. It's also how all the IoT startups are doing it, but I suspect this is partially so they have a service to sell and some degree of control.
I don't like that it depends on active internet which is often a problem for my use cases (hacking while commuting/traveling). Also it's a pain to switch the microcontroller to a new wifi network when you change locations.
With AP that serves websockets, a webpage can connect and configure the device to use the local wifi or simply stay in AP mode if the programmer doesn't need or have internet.
You probably don't want to do the server in JavaScript. My experience doing this with nodemcu is it's too heavy for the poor little ESP8266. Making a minimal server that does just enough HTTP to perform a websocket handshake won't be too hard. It could also serve a minimal http page that bootstrapped the full IDE from the net and cached the resources locally in the browser so the IDE could work offline, but without the chip hosting all the content.
Anyway, I'm currently working on the offline-first web IDE platform and will happily bring over the tech once I've worked out the kinks. I might just give up on making my own langauge and use espruino since it's so nice.