Hacker News Reader

I'd say the better way would be to develop the entire GUI with static HTML + JS files talking to the embedded device through a REST-ish interface.

That way you can get a clean separation of the front and back ends, and the web developers get to work with exactly the tech they are used to.

View on HN

I'm not a web developer, but that sounds pretty sane to me. However, the important part of their decision, I'm guessing, was not so much the PHP part, but the "get people who actually know about the web to do this for us." Someone has to build the site either way, and I'm guessing the embedded engineers they had working on it didn't really know how to go about that.

EDIT: Another possibility is that they already had PHP devs working on their corporate site or whatever, and they wanted to use them instead of hiring another team.

I am a web developer and the static HTML + JS with a RESTful API sounds excellent.

This is exactly what LuCI does on OpenWRT, except they use Lua, which is a sane language designed for embedded environments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com