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The Eclipse Foundation has delivered an open Internet of things (IoT) stack for Java developers.
Announced at the JavaOne 2014 conference in San Francisco today, the Open IoT Stack for Java simplifies IoT development by enabling developers to reuse a core set of frameworks and services in their IoT solutions. The stack makes it easier for Java developers to connect and manage devices in an IoT solution.
“We are announcing that the Eclipse Foundation is working toward creating a Java platform for IoT specifically targeted at connecting and managing devices,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse, in an interview. “And our goal with this is to ensure that Java developers have a free and open source platform for building IoT solutions. The Internet if Things is a huge opportunity.”
He added that the complexity of creating IoT solutions makes it difficult for developers to deliver new innovative solutions. The current state requires developers to create proprietary and closed solutions that are locked into a particular vendor, don’t easily interoperate and are slow to deliver.
However, there are a number of emerging IoT standards, such as Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Lightweight M2M, that will make it possible for devices to connect and interoperate. Open-source implementations of these standards will make it easier for developers to adopt these standards.
Moreover, there are 9 million Java developers who will bridge the world between enterprise and embedded development. Providing open-source Java frameworks and services will make it easier for Java to become a language for IoT, Milinkovich said.
“When you hear about the IoT opportunity, the focus is always on the number of billions of devices and the number of trillions of dollars in terms of the overall opportunity, but one of the things that barely gets mentioned is that in the next six to seven years, something on the order of 4 million developers need to be recruited and enabled to start working on IoT software,” he said. “That’s a huge problem. And with our focus on developers and our focus on IoT frameworks, device gateways and the like, we see this as a tremendous opportunity for open source.”
The Eclipse Open IoT Stack for Java is a set of Java frameworks and OSGi services that make it easy to connect and manage IoT solutions. The Open IoT Stack for Java includes support for OASIS MQTT, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) CoAP and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Lightweight M2M (LWM2M), as well as providing a set of services for building IoT Gateways. In addition to the core Open IoT Stack, a set of industrial frameworks are available to accelerate the process of creating home automation and SCADA factory automation solutions.
The Eclipse Open IoT Stack for Java is supported by a large community of companies, universities and research institutions, including 2lemetry, Actuate, Bitreactive, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, DC-Square, Eurotech, ibh Systems, IBM, LAAS-CNRS, openHAB, Ubuntu, Sierra Wireless and 2lemetry, Milinkovich said.
“Ubuntu is collaborating with the Eclipse Foundation on making sure developers can easily use any of their IoT solutions both on the cloud and the embedded space,” said Maarten Ectors, IoT strategy director at Canonical, in a statement.
Eclipse Foundation Delivers Open IoT Stack for Java
“The Internet of Things offers numerous opportunities for developers to create new solutions using data from devices connected to the Internet,” said Nobby Akiha, senior vice president of marketing at Actuate, in a statement. “The challenge is to establish a set of standards to make effective use of the many different sources of data. Eclipse’s new Open IoT Stack for Java will make it easier for the over 3.5 million BIRT developers to access, visualize and analyze IoT data to deliver actionable information to enhance customer experience and improve operations.”
The Open IoT Stack for Java is a set of open-source Java frameworks and OSGi services. It includes the following Eclipse IoT projects:
- Paho provides a Java implementation of the MQTT client, and Moquette provides a Java MQTT broker.
- Californium provides a Java implementation of CoAP, including Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) for IoT security.
- Leshan will provide a Java implementation of the Lightweight M2M standard for device management.
- Kura is a set of OSGi services for building IoT Gateways. It includes services for device management, application management, cloud connectivity and network configuration.
- Eclipse Smarthome is a set of Java and OSGi services for building smart home and assisted living solutions.
- Eclipse SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is a set of Java and OSGi services that implements many of the services required for a SCADA industrial automation system, including data acquisition, monitoring, data and event archival, visualization and value processing.
- Eclipse OM2M is an implementation of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) M2M standard. It provides a horizontal Service Capability Layer (SCL) that can be deployed in an M2M network, a gateway or a device.
Meanwhile, Milinkovich said a new version of Eclipse Kura 1.0 will be released at JavaOne, along with the newly announced Eclipse Leshan project to provide a Java implementation of the LWM2M server.
“IoT is a huge opportunity, and it is obviously attracting an enormous amount of investment and an enormous amount of hype,” Milinkovich told eWEEK. “But I definitely believe that the core infrastructure pieces of the Internet of things have to be based on open source. Part of the reason that’s true is simply because any other business model will not scale. When you’re talking about literally tens of billions of devices and sensors and then probably a few billion device gateways, if the software infrastructure that’s running on those is anything other than open source, I just don’t see how the IoT ecosystem can scale to the dimensions required.”
Indeed, similar to the way the Internet evolved to run on an open-source foundation based on Apache, Linux, etc., the IoT’s success will hinge on the establishment of open-source technologies at its core that everyone can use to enable connectivity and interoperability, he said.
“Open source was absolutely key to the success of the Internet as a whole,” Milinkovich said. “Remember when you used to have to dial-up CompuServe and that was the way to connect with the world? That model failed because it could not scale. I think there will be a lot of attempts to create the CompuServe of the Internet of things, but I think those will ultimately fail. They might last for a while, but I don’t see how that business model will last long term.”
“Even before co-founding the Eclipse Foundation M2M (now IoT) Working Group, Eurotech embraced the open source philosophy,” said Marco Carrer, vice president of software development at Eurotech, in a statement. “We have invested our development resources into creating and donating the Kura project to the community while also delivering it as a fully supported commercial offering through the Everyware Software Framework.”