Monthly Archives: January 2014

Smart Mobile Studio 2.0

Posted on by Posted in Announcements

Version 2.0We are very proud to release Smart Mobile Studio 2.0!

With version 2.0 a new visual designer is available that finally offers support for event handling right from the designer. Also a package manager allows to extend Smart Mobile Studio with 3rd party components (new chart and grid components are already shipped as packages).

To increase our market we have not only created 4 different editions (see below) tailored around the most popular demands, but also included a new command-line compiler, which is free of any charge! This allows building your projects on non-licensed machines (such as build servers).

Beside this, dozens of smaller changes has been made since the last release. A full change log can be found below.

Oh, this is really a great release 🙂
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node.js on a Raspberry Pi

Posted on by Posted in News

Raspberry Pi node.jsWith the Raspberry Pi a low cost computer is available that can be used for a great variety of different purposes.  The credit-card-sized single-board computer is capable to run Linux, which is available in form of different, custom tailored distributions. Most of them can be extended easily to run node.js, which was presented in-depth in the recent posts.

This article will shed a light on how to install node.js on a Raspberry Pi. It will present some nice ideas about how to get the best out of your Raspberry Pi (& alike). Last but not least the article concludes with some benchmarks to show some limits.

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Server-side Node.js (part 1): Introduction

Posted on by Posted in Documentation, News

Node.js Logo

In the new version 2 of Smart Mobile Studio you can now create server side projects! This is possible by using node.js, which is “the next big thing”: It’s an event based server side JavaScript application using the open source and very fast Google’s V8 engine. It was initially developed to be used as a HTTP server in the cloud, but nowadays you can also use it on your own PC or on a business server. It is powered by a small executable (6 MB)V8_JavaScript_engine_logo which doesn’t need an installation. Still, it can be extended easily via the package manager npm to fulfill any desired purpose and make it versatile in a lot different situations. For example, it is used by LinkedIn, WalMart and even Microsoft(!) in the Azure cloud. Also, PayPal has recently switched from Java to Node.js…

When you start using node.js, be aware that it is very different to web browser programming: it is a server with no GUI, so no ‘document’ and ‘window’ globals and no ‘alert’ function. It doesn’t run in a sandbox so you access all files, databases etc like you can with a normal application. It has it’s own API for this, which cannot be compared to “JavaScript for HTML”: it is just JavaScript and has nothing to do with web browsers.

But be aware: it is fun and addictive! 🙂

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