Development on the Revel Digital platform

Revel Digital is an extensible platform with a number of options for programmatic access, content creation, scripting, and more.

REST API

Programmatic access to your Revel Digital account including media, devices, playlists, reports, etc.

More information on our REST API is available here.

Gadgets

Gadgets are dynamic template/playlist components such as weather or a calendar. The gadget framework simplifies the process of creating pluggable content with properties exposed to the user for easy customization. Gadgets can be used directly in a playlist, or embedded in a more sophisticated template layout.

Gadgets are able to interface with the underlying player application and hardware for performing tasks such as event tracking, sending commands, or identifying player specific properties such as location.

More information on our Gadget framework is available here.

Webapps

Webapps are self-contained web applications which are packaged and uploaded to the Revel Digital as a media asset. Webapps are similar to Gadgets in that they share the same player interface capabilities, however a Webapp is a complete application and does not utilize the Gadget framework for exposing individual properties.

Webapps are a great option when developing medium/large scale UX (kiosks), or for more sophisticated dynamic content. Developers are free to utilize any JavaScript framework they like such as Angular, React, or Vue.

Revel Digital provides a number of tools to assist in the development of Webapps including:

• JavaScript client API for easily interfacing with the player
• GitHub Actions for simplifying the deployment process via Workflows
• Sample starter applications for Angular, React, and Vue

Player Scripting

Any template can contain custom script which is executed by the player at runtime in a protected environment. Scripting provides low-level access to virtually any aspect of the player and even the host system it's running on. As such, scripting is powerful but fairly technical and requires some knowledge of the host system script language (Python or JavaScript), as well possibly some knowledge of the underlying host environment depending on the purpose of the script.

More information on player scripting is available on our developers site.