What you can do with JavaScript is defined by the APIs available to it. The browser gives us the DOM and Node gives us its own API for dealing with files, the network and other aspects of the operating system, but how do you make different, new APIs available to JS? We do this over a bridge, a 2-way path for data to get into and out of JS, and more importantly, make use functionality and code in environments not otherwise accessible to JavaScript!
We’ll explore the basic message passing functionality common to most JavaScript bridges, and the specifics of a couple of implementations such as Node.js and Cordova/Phonegap for Android and iOS.
Using that basis, we’ll look at patterns for building up rich APIs with features like eventing and asynchronous foreign function calls in JS, all on top of simple message passing.
Finally, we’ll look at a few entertaining applications of bridged JavaScript code.
Speaker Bio
Noah is working on an SDK for Hybrid Mobile App development, and curating a library of Seinfeld gifs as an engineer on Mobify’s product team. Noah loves systemsy programming, making use of math and film photography. He used to do distributed computing at Apple.
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What you can do with JavaScript is defined by the APIs available to it. The browser gives us the DOM and Node gives us its own API for dealing with files, the network and other aspects of the operating system, but how do you make different, new APIs available to JS? We do this over a bridge, a 2-way path for data to get into and out of JS, and more importantly, make use functionality and code in environments not otherwise accessible to JavaScript!
We’ll explore the basic message passing functionality common to most JavaScript bridges, and the specifics of a couple of implementations such as Node.js and Cordova/Phonegap for Android and iOS.
Using that basis, we’ll look at patterns for building up rich APIs with features like eventing and asynchronous foreign function calls in JS, all on top of simple message passing.
Finally, we’ll look at a few entertaining applications of bridged JavaScript code.
Speaker Bio
Noah is working on an SDK for Hybrid Mobile App development, and curating a library of Seinfeld gifs as an engineer on Mobify’s product team. Noah loves systemsy programming, making use of math and film photography. He used to do distributed computing at Apple.