If you are a Web Developer then building Livestax apps should come pretty naturally. Livestax apps can be built in any web technology, so you can use the tools and languages that you already know and love.

The principles of responsive design and UI/UX that apply to building any modern web application, also apply to building an app for Livestax, so it should be familiar territory for you.

Ultimately the characteristic that distinguishes your Livestax application from a standard web application is a single line of code:

<script src=”//assets.livestax.com/livestax-0.4.0.min.js”></script>

This script tag includes the Livestax JavaScript API into your client-side code base, instantaneously making your app a first-class citizen within Livestax.

The Livestax JavaScript API provides a wealth of different functionality, from the ability to display a simple dialog box, to the means of communicating with other apps. This functionality is very powerful, but we quickly recognised that developers would need a way of validating how their app interacted with Livestax, before it got to production. Enter the Livestax Simulator.

The Simulator was designed to provide a test environment for mimicking how an app behaves. At its heart is the ability to configure the Simulator to load any web-page accessible via a url into an iframe. Providing that the web page includes the Livestax JavaScript API, the Simulator will recognise it as a Livestax app.

Once the Developer has configured the Simulator to load their app, they have access to a number of different panels, each dedicated to a specific aspect of the Livestax JavaScript API. For example the Developer can send a message to their app via the communication API, or add an entry to the Key Value Store, that their app is configured to watch. The goal being to provide instant feedback that their app is behaving as expected.

In practice we have found that the Simulator makes the journey from development to production a smooth ride. The ability to load an app that could be running on localhost into the Simulator, helps Developers identify issues early in the development process, and most importantly gives feedback about how apps will behave within Livestax.

We hope you find the Livestax Simulator a useful tool, and if you are interested in seeing how it was built then take a look at the repository – it’s open source.