Обсуждение:NetsBlox

A visual programming environment for introducing distributed computing to secondary education.

Broll, B., Lédeczi, Á., Zare, H., Do, D.N., Sallai, J., Völgyesi, P., Maróti, M., Brown, L., Vanags, C., 2018. A visual programming environment for introducing distributed computing to secondary education. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 118, 189–200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2018.02.021

Furthermore, there are a large number of publicly available, interesting datasets on the web. Examples include the weather [32], air pollution [2], seismic data [8], real-time traffic information [21] and many others. Typically the data is visualized on a given website, but in many cases, a public API is available to access the data programmatically. The NetsBlox server provides access to a select set of interesting data sources. These are available for NetsBlox programs via a simple abstraction called Remote Procedure Call (RPC). Essentially, an RPC provides a mapping between the NetsBlox call block and the corresponding API of the public data service. A set of related RPCs are grouped together to form a Service. For example, the NetsBlox Weather Service has an RPC called “temp” that takes arguments for the location and returns the corresponding temperature. A second RPC, “icon”, returns a weather icon representing the current conditions at the given location. On the NetsBlox server, they silently invoke the proper calls on the OpenWeatherMap API to get the data and then send it back in a format expected by the NetsBlox programming environment.