Dear developers and followers,
Happy New Year!
During the holiday, I put a bit of time on understanding the current implementation and the issues.
Our Motivational document states the current UpStage implementation is written in several languages; therefore, logically the structure of current implementation should be loose. I was wrong. When I modify code on the client-end, I must rearrange the code on server-end accordingly. In the last 2,3 weeks, I had UpStage crashing quite frequently on my local network.
I learned a lot from these trials/failures. Then I looked into Node.js.
The advantages of Node.js:
- The coding languages are relatively less than current implementation. Node.js uses Javascript as its client/server side programming language.
- Plenty of modules. Node.js introduces the concept of modules. Modules allow programmers to reuse code from different projects.
- Node.js application does not require Flashplugin.
- Bootstrap support for mobile support projects.
The disadvantages:
- Application is “session” based, which means if a user leaves a stage (in my practice, a chat room), the user will not get previous information showing on browser.
- Unknown of video streaming support
The advantages above satisfy the basic require for new UpStage implementation.
I’m currently working on a Chatroom application for further evaluation. There are modules for Text to Speech. Cylon is one of them. For the presentation, I would use Bootstrap to improve the usage of space (Maybe introduce dropdown menus to encapsulate some similar functions, such as choosing colour). I will also examine about “session” in the next 2 weeks.
Then here is a update from Chromium blog. Flash plugin will not work on Chrome/Chromium browser from September this year (2015). Chrome/Chromium 39 would work on UpStage application. However, we do not know what will happen once NPAPI deprecation is completed.
Some more detailed information about NPAPI deprecation:
https://www.chromium.org/developers/npapi-deprecation
Sincerely
Yue Li
Developer on the AUT UpStage Team
