It’s a known fact that we (or at least) love Sun SPOTs. Not the ones on the sun but the Sensor nodes developed by Sun Labs (now/soon Oracle Labs?) a couple of years ago.
Speaking Java better than any language out there (including French ;-)), when the first fully-natively-java Wireless Sensor Nodes came out you can imagine my joy. Since then I can’t remember a paper we wrote that does not use Spots in its prototype! We worked quite a lot with them, created several stacks to make them “Web-enabled” and RESTful, to make them part of the Web of Things!
When we had the chance to meet part of the Sun SPOTs crew at WoT 2010, they told us they were about to release some software to be able to apply and experiment with the Web of Things concepts.
Well, here we go! The Sun SPOTs now have their own WoT stack. Probably the most important innovation when compared to the already available WoT stacks for the SPOTs (such as ours), is a Nano App Server. Inspired from the Java App Servers, which are basically Web Servers on steroids, it lets you register Web Apps which run on the nodes or on the gateway (i.e., host PC). The Web Apps are then responsible for handling part of the URL subspace (e.g., /…/blink which would be an app for making the SPOTs LEDs blink) and serving the Spots functionality in a RESTful manner.
The Nano App Server also offers support for great functionalities that definitely make sense for such small nodes such as HTTP compression or built-in support for caching!
All of this is best summarized on Vipul Gupta’s blog. Tutorial files and coding exercises are also available on this blog. Last but not least, a presentation guides your through the most important parts and steps, enjoy!
