Programming

I decided last night to renew my Apple Developer Account and decided to work on apps again. As a result my old App came back to the App Store. This app is the “Are You Worthy?” App, which is basically a Magic 8 Ball to test to see if you’re worthy of wielding Thor’s Hammer, Mjolnir. Nothing fancy just for fun.

A few months ago I wrote a program to use:

• Speech Recognition via Web Speech API.
• Pipe that to Chat GPT’s API
• Pipe the response to AWS Polly’s Text To Speech Engine

I put the code here: https://github.com/scottpreston/chatgpt-srtts

Nothing fancy, just a little playing around and enough content for about a 30minute talk at ColumbusJS.

2017 is halfway over and while some of these trends started a few yeas ago I think we’re about to see a few of these really catch-on, and by catch-on, I mean go mainstream and get funded.

Over the next week I’m going to discuss these three trends in a little more details and provide some code or projects to help you get started!

Trend 1 – Alexa / Voice / AI Chat

What does user experience look like without a mouse & keyboard or easy to enter form fields? How do people talk to AI systems to solve problems? These systems can be through devices like Alexa or virtual systems like automated chatbots. Understanding psychology and human behavior become just as valuable as business knowledge when designing these systems. Because of this we will see new software architectures come into play that deal with these variations and have multiple and guided user flows.

Trend 2 – JS/UI Architecture

SPAs (Single Page Applications) built on frameworks like Angular and React changed the way we think about building software. But for the longest time it was code, code, code without much thought of how it’s going to scale, and how it’s going to be supported in the enterprise. These systems need to hang around and be maintainable for 10 years, refactoring your apps should not have to entail complete system rewrites. Having architectures for UIs that allow for modular building and refactoring are crucial for adoption of these technologies that change every 9 months.

Trend 3 – Augmented Reality

There’s more and more data about the world around us. Why not provide more ways for people to interact with this data? Why make everyone have to look something up on a browser or an app? Voice combined with computer vision begins to bridge this gap. Google Glass still might not be the right use case, but camera augmentation, heads-up displays in cars, smart kiosk and push voice will be where this begins to have application.

Sorry but all the explanations this far have been bad so I thought I’d simplify it.

In plain Redux without connect you need to manually bind up your store.dispatch to your components as well as subscribe to updates so you can call store.getState(). But your components are suppose to be dumb.

const store = createStore(reducer);

const render = () => ReactDOM.render( // turns ReactDOM.render into executable function
  <Counter
    value={store.getState()}
    onIncrement={() => store.dispatch({ type: 'INCREMENT' })}
    onDecrement={() => store.dispatch({ type: 'DECREMENT' })}
  />,
  document.getElementById('root')
);

render();
store.subscribe(render);

So rather than manually linking dispatch and subscribing to updates we create two mapping functions, both of which bind the dispatch and the state to props of the ‘connected component’. So in this case all updates to this.store.getState().value are mapped to this.props.value and rather than mapping dispatch directly, we just wrap it and pass it in as a prop.

// create component
class ContainerComponent extends React.Component {
  render() {
    <PresentationComponent 
      value={this.props.value}
      onIncrement={this.props.onIncrement} 
      onDecrement={this.props.onDecrement} />
  }
}
// create state mapping
function mapStateToProps(state) {
  return { 
    value: state.value
  };
}

// add dispatch mapper 
function mapDispatchToProps(dispatch) { 
  return { 
    onIncrement: function() { 
      dispatch({type:'INCREMENT'}); 
    }, 
    onDecrement : function() { 
      dispatch({type:'DECREMENT'}); 
    } 
  }; 
} 
export default connect(mapStateToProps,mapDispatchToProps)(ContainerComponent);

Now when you call your components you can simply call the value passed in like so.

export default class PresentationComponent extends React.Component {
render() {
    return (      
        <div>
<span>{this.props.value}</span>
<button onClick={this.props.onIncrement}>Increment</button>
<button onClick={this.props.onDecrement}>Decrement</button>
        </div>
    );
  }
}

For more information you can checkout both of these github projects for reference.

• https://github.com/scottpreston/react-starter
• https://github.com/scottpreston/react-app
• https://github.com/scottpreston/hello-redux

• If I wanted to work with compiled languages, I would have stuck with Java.
• If I wanted complicated build systems, I would have stuck with Java.
• If I wanted complicated all encompassing frameworks, I would have stuck with Java.
• If I wanted complicated unreadable error messages, I would have stuck with Java.
• If I wanted to run server side code (Node) in my browser, I would have stuck with Java.

Something needs to happen to fix JavaScript making it more and more like Java is not the answer. Or is it time to move to another language with less ceremony???

If you’ve ever seen this error:

MinOZW: error while loading shared libraries: libopenzwave.so.1.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

or 

Error: libopenzwave.so.1.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Just type this and it did the trick for me (Ubuntu 14.04).

sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib64

I’ve been searching for a NodeJS server for web sockets, but socket.io, required both the client and server to be run from within node. I wanted to connect to this server via a normal web page using WebSockets from HTML5. Here’s some code, hope you find it useful:

https://github.com/scottpreston/examples

Server Code

var WebSocketServer = require('ws').Server;
var wss = new WebSocketServer({port: 3000});

wss.on('connection', function (ws) {
    ws.on('message', function (message) {
        console.log('received: %s', message);
        ws.send(message + "!!!!");
    });
});

Client Code

    var websocket = new WebSocket('ws://localhost:3000');
    websocket.onopen = function (evt) {
        websocket.send("This Rocks!");
        websocket.close();
     }
    websocket.onmessage = function (evt) {
        console.log('RESPONSE: ' + evt.data);
    };

I was wondering how RequireJS and AMD worked. So I created this snip. It might not be correct but it worked for me.

load('foo', function (foo){
        var f = new foo();
        f.a = 100;
        f.b = 200;
        alert(f.add());
    });

    function define(name, callback) {
        modules[name] = callback;
    }

    function load(file, callback) {
        var script = document.createElement('script');
        script.type = 'text/javascript';
        script.async = true;
        script.src = file + ".js";
        (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(script);
        script.onload = function() {
            callback(modules[file]);
        };
    }

    var modules = [];

// foo.js
define("foo", function() {
    var foo = {
        a: 1,
        b: 2,
        add: function () {
            return this.a + this.b;
        }
    };
    return foo;
});