How to Host Your Own Web App
iKommunicate has an 8GB micro SD Card that can host 3rd party HTML5 web apps, so get developing and make iKommunicate do lots of amazing things.
We want iKommunicate to be a catalyst for developers to create Web Apps that will do new and exciting things onboard boats. The power of HTML5 allows a web app running in your web browser to do things that previously could only have been done by expensive, complex and specialist navigation or control programs.
On the SD Card is a folder called 'hosted' and you can copy a single web page or even a complete website to this folder and then just call the first home page i.e. index.html by typing the following URL in to your browser address bar;
http://ikommunicate.local/hosted/index.html
The supplied Micro SD card can be swapped for a larger capacity card, so the size of website that you host can be quite large and sophisticated.
It is important that any libraries are also copied to the SD Card inside the 'hosted' folder and properly indexed and called from the web pages.
It should be noted that iKommunicate is not a full function Apache LAMP server. It is not running LINUX and does not support PHP, Ajax and the other services normally found on a modern web server. However, the latest HTML5 web apps do not generally require all of these services and as long as the pages are designed around HTML, CSS and Javascript, they should run quite happily when hosted on the iKommunicate SD card.
To access the Signal K data that iKommunicate generates, you will need to study the Specification and developer information on the Signal K website which has plenty of examples and sample code available to get you up and running very quickly...
Digital Yacht have also created a Developers Guide (SDK) which can be found on our GitHub site...