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Ask HN: Best web server/language/framework for embedded?

1 points by rapfaria ↗ HN
My current company is thinking of rewriting from the ground-up an embedded software, which is currently accessed through a simple wsgi server.

My initial suggestion was to use something like Flask + lighttpd, which would serve our purposes, but the team wants to go with Node.JS, as this would be somewhat better for their careers later on.

I do have a lot of experience with Python/Django, and the other developers have some C#/Java/React experience.

Anyone have any experience doing embedded web development? How would go in this situation?

6 comments

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howard941
I'm sure that when you say embedded it's not what most firmware people people think of as embedded, namely resource constrained MCUs where python's a dream and nothing's dynamically allocated and freed. Microchip has a somewhat nasty but functional example web server that runs on things like the dsPIC. You're not deploying onto a little processor though are you? What are you deploying onto?
rapfaria
It's close to a beagle bone black running a minimal debian distribution.
howard941
That's a luxurious platform for an embedded system. You're not at all power or environment constrained? Will your end product actually use all of the peripherals and I/O on the board? BBs (and rPIs) are great prototyping platforms, don't be surprised if there's resistance to the cost when it's time to go to market.
rapfaria
Not at all constrained. It's already on the market, but maintenance is excrutiating, so that's why we want to rewrite.
howard941
It's really challenging to offer up solutions without knowing why the maint is excruciating and what's being servede. Are the updates done manually? Are the embedded swervers serving up dynamic content sourced from somewhere other than the local device?
actionowl
> the team wants to go with Node.JS, as this would be somewhat better for their careers later on.

This sounds like Resume Driven Development to me... which seems like a really silly reason to switch languages. Node.js will have new challenges, and different performance characteristics (maybe better in some areas, maybe worse depending on your use case.)

I've done a lot of backend Node.js development but wouldn't migrate an existing project to it without a good reason. Maybe you have a lot of time and bandwidth to debug any new issues and to learn a new ecosystem (which is something I rarely have.)