Table of Contents

General Intro

Manifold is a tool not directed towards developers or hobbyists, but actual owners of things. It is a platform that owners of IoT things can use to manage their stuff, from phones and smart watches to knives and blenders. Manifold interfaces with the pico engine (you will see later on how it actually does this) and essentially just displays and interacts with the picos on that engine in a way that makes sense in the context of the Internet of Things. For example, owners shouldn't need to know anything about channels, or eci's, or even what a ruleset is. From their point of view, they have a physical thing and want to manage it via Manifold and see that digital representation actually behave the way it should. i.e. a blender should be able to blend things, turn off remotely if it has the capability to do so, and even interact with other things in the kitchen if needed. As another example, you can imagine that I want my air conditioning to turn on as soon as my car is close enough to my house in the summer. An owner would set up that interaction using Manifold, but the technical process of how everything actually works is abstracted away.

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Webpack also provides some other features that are really useful, like hot reloading. Whenever we make a change to a file and save it in our text editor, webpack will notice the change and update the browser with your new change without you ever having to refresh the webpage.

Here's a good article on bundling: https://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-modules-bundling-transpiling/