Roku publishes IDK to allow consumers to develop applications for their Roku

• brs

  2 111 0.0 JavaScript

  An interpreter for the BrightScript language that runs on non-Roku platforms.

It's amazing to me that Roku has the plurality of the US streaming market (37%), yet its development ecosystem is so terrible. For those who don't know:

1. The only public development API requires the use of their proprietary language BrightScript which is poorly documented, and for which no official compiler, interpreter, or runtime environment is available. Enthusiasts had to create an interpreter for it (https://github.com/sjbarag/brs) to speed up development time. Previously you had to push your app to a Roku to run it before you could learn of any syntax errors.

2. They do have a C/C++ API, but they limit access to big orgs and require an NDA to use it.

There are plenty of cool projects, like a Prince of Persia port (https://github.com/lvcabral/Prince-of-Persia-Roku).

That they are finally shoring up their poor developer ecosystem with C/C++ and JavaScript APIs is great, but it's unfortunate that they aren't allowing these apps to be distributed through their official store.

• Prince-of-Persia-Roku

  2 90 10.0 Brightscript

  A port of the classic game Prince of Persia (1989) to Roku

It's amazing to me that Roku has the plurality of the US streaming market (37%), yet its development ecosystem is so terrible. For those who don't know:

1. The only public development API requires the use of their proprietary language BrightScript which is poorly documented, and for which no official compiler, interpreter, or runtime environment is available. Enthusiasts had to create an interpreter for it (https://github.com/sjbarag/brs) to speed up development time. Previously you had to push your app to a Roku to run it before you could learn of any syntax errors.

2. They do have a C/C++ API, but they limit access to big orgs and require an NDA to use it.

There are plenty of cool projects, like a Prince of Persia port (https://github.com/lvcabral/Prince-of-Persia-Roku).

That they are finally shoring up their poor developer ecosystem with C/C++ and JavaScript APIs is great, but it's unfortunate that they aren't allowing these apps to be distributed through their official store.

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• roca

  1 25 0.0 Brightscript

  A command-line tool for running brightscript tests

  

> Enthusiasts had to create an interpreter for it (https://github.com/sjbarag/brs) to speed up development time.

Author of that interpreter here - didn't expect to wake up to that repo appearing in a top HN comment! That started as a side project and was maintained during spare work hours (thanks, Hulu!) for the past 3 years, along with a unit testing framework that runs in it (https://github.com/hulu/roca).

I'm happy to answer any "developing for Roku" questions that come up :)

Suggest a related project