I know that server side programming will play a role in my thesis project, because I will need persistence in the expression eco-system to support

– archives for users to draw upon previous creations
– gallery to save and exhibit user creations to a community
– for manipulating data within and across activities

Luckily for me, we are covering server side programming in Networked Media. For this weeks NM assignment I am going to work on re-creating my thesis example activity ‘the transformation of silence into language and action’ {{link}}, which right now uses frontend framework vue.js to handle the data, and instead I am going to try and set up the activity to run server side using node and express.

server side programming for me always requires a fair amount of mapping out whats happening with the data.

And now I’m thinking that my data system map should include the browser, the server file, the index.html file, and the json file I will use to store the data.

I am able to get the server going and receiving and writing out data to the canvas using the method I deployed for my genocide watch-act project from last semester,

but when I try using the method based on the Networked Media class notes I am getting this error repeatedly.

Here is a video of the project working

nm week3HW doc from Daniel Silber-Baker on Vimeo.

And here is a development codepen for the frontend (try pressing submit and dragging the objects)

The next step for the thesis thread is
– draw from server with raphael js instead of p5
– to make a javascript object for all 5 user responses to be sent to server and back –> so eventually I can be saving and accessing multiple discrete user paths *need help with setting this up*
– connect server side with vue for backend-frontend workflow (does it make sense to use vue and node together?