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The Eclipse Foundation, which has been leading an effort to develop open-source technologies for Internet of things application development, announced that the Eclipse Internet of Things (IoT) Working Group has delivered new releases of four open-source IoT projects the group initiated over a year ago.
The four projects, hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, are Eclipse Kura 2.0, Eclipse Paho 1.2, Eclipse SmartHome 0.8 and Eclipse OM2M 1.0. These projects are helping developers rapidly create new IoT solutions based on open source and open standards.
“We are certain that the Internet of Things will only be successful if it is built on open technologies,” Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said. “Our goal at Eclipse is to ensure that there is a vendor-neutral open source community to provide those technologies.”
Eclipse IoT is an open-source community that provides the core technologies developers need to build IoT solutions. The community is composed of more than 200 contributors working on 24 projects. These projects are made up of over 2 million lines of code and have been downloaded over 500,000 times, Eclipse officials said.
Moreover, the Eclipse IoT Working Group includes 30 member companies that collaborate to provide software building blocks in the form of open-source implementations of the standards, services and frameworks that enable an open Internet of things.
In addition to updating four of its existing IoT projects, Eclipse also proposed a new one. Eclipse Kapua is an open-source project proposal from Eurotech to create a modular integration platform for IoT devices and smart sensors that aims to bridge operation technology with information technology, Milinkovich said.
Eclipse Kapua focuses on managing edge IoT nodes, including their connectivity, configuration and application life cycle. It also allows aggregation of real-time data streams from the edge, either archiving them or routing them toward enterprise IT systems and applications.
“As organizations continue to implement IoT solutions, they are increasingly turning to Eclipse IoT for open-source technologies to implement these solutions,” Ian Skerrett, vice president of marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, told eWEEK. “For instance, Eclipse Paho has become the default implementation for developers using MQTT [formerly MQ Telemetry Transport], and Eclipse Kura significantly reduces the costs and complexity of implementing an IoT gateway. It is clear open source will be a major force in the Internet of things and Eclipse IoT has become significant source of open-source technology for IoT.”
Eclipse Paho provides open-source client implementations of the MQTT and MQTT-SN messaging protocols. The new Paho 1.2 release includes updates to existing Java, Python, JavaScript, C, .NET, Android and Embedded C/C++ client libraries. Improvements in the new version include automatic reconnect and offline buffering functionality for the C, Java and Android clients; WebSocket support for the Java and Python clients; and a new Go Client, which is a component for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD. Paho 1.2 is now available.
Eclipse Updates Four Key IoT Projects, Launches a New One
Eclipse Kura is a framework for building IoT gateways. The latest release, Kura 2.0, delivers a new responsive user interface based on Bootstrap that simplifies Kura gateway management from mobile devices. There also is new support for multiple cloud connections, enabling scenarios where a single gateway can be simultaneously connected to multiple cloud platforms including Eurotech Everyware Cloud, Amazon AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure IoT and IBM IoT Foundation.
Kura 2.0 also offers an improved onboarding process for developers with new tools and code samples to ease the creation of Kura applications and drag-and-drop deployment of Kura apps available from the Eclipse Marketplace. In addition, Kura 2.0 provides tighter integration with Apache Camel to enable declarative message routing within the business logic of the Eclipse Kura applications. Kura 2.0 will be available later in June.
Eclipse SmartHome is a framework for building smart home solutions that have a strong focus on heterogeneous environments. It is designed to run on embedded devices, such as Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black or Intel Edison.
The new Eclipse SmartHome 0.8 release brings a new REST API—including Server-sent events (SSE) support—that exposes the functionality of Eclipse SmartHome to clients for easy interaction. SmartHome’s “Paper UI” is an administration interface that makes use of this new API. It also features additional bindings to support many new devices, like Sonos speakers, LIFX bulbs, Belkin WeMo devices, digitalSTROM systems and others. It includes an OSGi EnOcean Base Driver contributed by Orange Labs. And the new release comes with a new rule engine that supports templates for beginners, JavaScript for automation rules and graphical rule editors, contributed by ProSyst, Skerrett said.
Eclipse SmartHome 0.8 is now available for download.
Finally, Eclipse OM2M is an open-source implementation of the oneM2M standard. The oneM2M standard is an effort to ensure the most efficient deployment of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Eclipse OM2M provides a set of horizontal IoT services that enable the development of IoT solutions independent of the underlying network.
OM2M 1.0 features a modular platform architecture based on OSGi that makes it extensible, Eclipse officials said. It features a lightweight REST API exposed through multiple communication bindings, including HTTP and CoAP protocols, and supports various content formats such as XML and JSON. It also offers flexible data storage based on an abstract persistence layer supporting embedded and server databases, in-memory mode, and SQL and NoSQL models.
The Eclipse OM2M implementation also follows key oneM2M concepts, including dedicated Common Service Entity (CSE) for Infrastructure node (IN), Middle Node (MN) and Application Service Node (ASN). It also supports Common Service Function (CSF) including registration, application and service management, discovery, data management and repository, subscription and notification, group management, security and more.
The 1.0 release of Eclipse OM2M will be available later in June.