Category: Technology

Hello I’m WebKit, a Browser: Serve Me… XML Please! 4,136

Hello I’m WebKit, a Browser: Serve Me… XML Please!

Warning: this is an extremely technical post! But since this bug drove me nuts for a little while, I do have to expose it to the WoT community 😉 Finalizing the open-sourcing of our framework for making RFID tags part of the Web (more about that here!), I was testing it the whole day on various browsers. Firefox, fine! Opera, fine! IE, fine! Chrome, what the heck is that page!? As you might know, a resource in REST is not bound to a format (or representation as they call it). Rather, a well-done RESTful API should be able to serve...

Welcoming the Sun SPOTs to the Web of Things 3,737

Welcoming the Sun SPOTs to the Web of Things

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...

When “Dumb” Things Join the WoT: The Art of Barcode Scanning 3,086

When “Dumb” Things Join the WoT: The Art of Barcode Scanning

Ok, so we talked a lot about integrating sensor nodes to the Web, then about integrating home appliances to the Web or about integrating industrial machines to the Web. How about simple, dumb, traditional objects? Well the community is working on it! As an example, one of our latest projects is to Web-enable the global RFID networks (EPC) so that every RFID-tagged object becomes a true citizen of the World Wide Web (see our paper at IoT 2010). I’ll tell you more about this project soon but meanwhile I want to talk about even more dumb objects: those tagged with...

Mashing Up our Web-Enabled Homes 4,800

Mashing Up our Web-Enabled Homes

Imagine every home appliance being 1) IPv6 enabled 2) RESTful, imagine the tools you could create on top of such an eco-system! In particular, imagine the idea of “physical mashups” becoming a reality in our homes sweet homes: creating simple, ad-hoc applications on top of your appliances as easily as you can create Web 2.0 (virtual) mashups nowadays. The dream of every hacker and tech-saavy? Well at least one of our dreams (and part of my Ph.D. by the way ;-))! Well a dream that we have been trying to demonstrate and implement lately. The outcome is two papers. In...

Web of Things @ SXSW 2011? 2,578

Web of Things @ SXSW 2011?

Some of you might remember/have attended our SXSW 2010 workshop. Well we enjoyed giving it so much that we decided to come up with two brand new proposals for this year’s SXSW! The Real-World as a Web API is our first proposal: The world of “physical devices” such as home appliances/electronics, real-time city data, RFID-tagged objects, mobile phones, etc. has long been longing for a seamless and universal integration platform. Out of a great number of heavy-and-not-so-great middleware a surprising one is emerging: the Web! In this presentation we would like to show how Web developers might well be the...

Prepare your submissions: Workshop on the Urban Internet of Things, Tokyo 571

Prepare your submissions: Workshop on the Urban Internet of Things, Tokyo

We are organizing the First International Workshop on the Urban Internet of Things at the IOT 2010 conference, at the end of this month, and we would love to invite you all to submitting a demo or a paper. Unlike the WoT2010 which brought together WoT researchers, we emphasize here concrete applications practical solutions that can be built on top of WoT. We particularly welcome real-world deployments that can highlight the plus/minuses of using WoT as infrastructure for a scalable urban-scale data collection and processing. We would like to bring closer practitioners in the area of smart cities (industries that...

OpenPicus Community & FlyPort 5,306

OpenPicus Community & FlyPort

The OpenPicus community released a wi-fi module called FlyPort. It is a small device that uses the Microchip PIC24F (256K Flash+16K Ram, 16Mips@32Mhz) and MRF24WB0MA/RM WI-FI certified module. FlyPort runs a wireless Stack (TCP/IP version 5.25 from Microchip) and has a 26 Pin connector for easy prototyping. Applications and libraries are open source and can be freely downloaded from the openpicus website. Programmers have full control of the wi-fi module, thus the Flyport can act as tiny Web server and client that can directly interact with other Web resources directly, without requiring a gateway. Besides, this project has a social...

Touch the Web 2010 @ ICWE 2010 5,148

Touch the Web 2010 @ ICWE 2010

A few days ago I had the chance to participate to the “touch the Web 2010” workshop. The goals of the workshop were rather similar to the ones of WoT 2010 however, rather than being hosted at a Ubicomp/Pervasive venue, Touch the Web was collocated with ICWE2010, a pure Web engineering conference. The most surprising fact was probably how close the two communities are getting. Web people are increasingly interested in embedded/physical/sensor computing, and on the other hand, pervasive people are getting more and more convinced that the Web protocols as not so bad after all (take this paper for...

CouchDB 1.0 released 4,759

CouchDB 1.0 released

As in our project we needed a (quickly setup, reliable, and flexible) backend system to store sensor data, I played around with CouchDB as I wanted to explore a RESTful data store. As a matter of fact, the version 1.0 was released just a few minutes before I installed it. First impression, wow. Sleek, pretty fast, damn easy to use, flexible as any software should be (not the conventional click and run install, but damn well documented installation). I have to admit I’m impressed by the quality of this release, just as much as by the documentation. I think this...

COAP-01 draft out! 3,367

COAP-01 draft out!

After the last draft released in december, the COAP folks just released a few days ago a more refined version of the COAP draft, with additional thoughts on coap-http mapping, RESTful verbs for constrained environments, and pub/sub notifications, and more. Abstract This document specifies the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), a specialized RESTful transfer protocol for use with constrained networks and nodes for machine-to-machine applications such as smart energy and building automation. These constrained nodes often have 8-bit microcontrollers with small amounts of ROM and RAM, while networks such as 6LoWPAN often have high packet error rates and a typical throughput...