Security

Thanks - the port 88 thing is interesting - I wasn't aware that it was on by default (it'd be good to be able to disable it on the ESP8266 port or at the very least have a very prominent note about its existence as it is quite a big hole).

However it's only available to people with access to the WiFi network - and as there is no HTTPS/TLS on the ESP8266 port at the moment you're going to have security issues there as well.

I have come from using the Particle Photon witch is secure out of the box but was looking for a device I could program in JavaScript.

You could look at http://www.espruino.com/WiFi - which doesn't have any ports open by default and has HTTPS and TLS support.

You're comparing Particle Photon (which is sold for $20, and costs $80/year for commercial use) to the ESP8266, which is sold for about $3 (none of which pays for Espruino software development).

The ESP8266 port has been created by some very impressive work from the Espruino community. The people working on the ESP8266 port are doing it for free - they have absolutely no responsibility to do anything if they don't want to.

This is why I have the official devices that I sell, where I take a responsibility for making sure things 'just work' and spend a lot of time supporting users and trying to make sure that they're reliable, secure and well documented.

So please don't assume that Espruino isn't secure just because you tried a totally unsupported version of it :)