Category: Book

6,648

What is the Web of Things?

Note: this article was first published in the IoT Technica Curiosa magazine. The Internet of Things – IoT for short – is here to stay and to change our world for the better. This grand vision depicts a world where people, buildings, and physical objects are connected to a single and common network. Bottles of soda, lighting systems, cars and everything in between can provide services and exchange data with each other. You might have noticed that the Internet of Things feels very much like an Intranet of Things: to interact with 10 different devices from your phone, you have...

3,596

Node.js, GPIO and the Raspberry Pi

This post is an excerpt of the Chapter 4 “Getting Started with Embedded Systems” in Building the Web of Things, a Manning book by Dominique Guinard and Vlad Trifa. In a previous post we talked about the increasing importance of Node.js for embedded systems in the IoT but we didn’t have a concrete look at what using Node.js on an embedded device looked like. In this post we’ll look at what it means for the Raspberry Pi. Installing Node.js on a Raspberry Pi The first step is to install Node on your Pi. The latest versions of Raspbian (the Pi...

2,561

Supporting ThingMonk 2016 & IoT Diversity Program

In the early days of the IoT there were a handful of conferences you had to attend every year. Most of these early birds are still in play such as Ubicomp & Pervasive, ACM IoT, RFID Journal Live, O’Reilly Solid or smaller ones such as the very fine Sketching in Hardware or our very own WoT Workshop (edition 2016 taking place real soon!). Things have changed however, with the IoT developing at light speed, conferences and events started to mushroom. There isn’t a city that isn’t organizing it’s dozen of IoT events every month. This is all a bit overwhelming...

7,519

Building the Web of Things Book is Out!

December 1oth, 2014 Vlad and I signed a contract with Manning Publications for a book on the Web of Things, a year and 8 month later, we are thrilled to announce that Building the Web of Things is out! We learned the hard way that writing a book is not as trivial as it seems. “Oh, we’ll just refresh our PhD theses and we’re done in a few weeks” has gradually turned into “OK, well, I guess we’ll have to write these chapters from scratch over the next few months. What about the source code? Which source code? Let’s just...

1,493

Free book: Using the Web to Build the IoT

As we speak, “Building the Web of Things”, the world’s first Web of Things book, is in preparation to be printed. Since Vlad and I just couldn’t wait idling we decided to embark on another book adventure: Manning approached us with a great idea, a free e-book (yes free as in free beer!) about the Internet of Things! The very idea of this book is to be a collection of chapters borrowed from other books that will form a basis of technologies that will have a fundamental influence on what the IoT will become! Indeed, the Internet of Things offers...

3,736

Web of Things vs Internet of Things: 1/2

In this series of articles, excerpted from the first few chapters of our shiny new book: Building the Web of Things, we wanted to clarify what is the difference between the Internet of Things and the Web of Things, should there be one. Let’s put it straight first: the pun was intended! We always used the term Web of Things and opposed it to the Internet of Things to provoke a little but for a good cause: raising the awareness on the need for protocols to converge at the application layer. In the first part (a cross-post of our DZONE...

3,261

What’s in HTTP/2 for the Internet of Things? 1/2

If you followed this blog you probably know that the motto of the Web of Things community is to re-use Web protocols to build a truly interoperable Application Layer for the Internet of Things. One of the key protocols we are talking about is HTTP currently massively deployed on the Web in its 1.1 version. HTTP/1.1 is a great protocol when used correctly to build Web Services as illustrated in this book! However, it dates back from 1999. Remember this time? Back then we were using Windows 95, wired phones to call each other and the IoT term had just...