Architecting the Web of Things, for techies and thinkers!
Folks, I (Dom as well) *finally* submitted the final version of my PhD thesis last friday to ETH Zurich, so I can now be officially called Dr. Vlad Trifa. You can download the final version here (16MB, 190 pages). Feedback is welcome, typos less (freshly submitted so give a little time to worry less! Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:
Besides the fact that we are big Sun SPOTs fans, we also got increasingly more interested in the OpenPicus platform, not only because the constant motivation of the project founder Claudio Carnevali is impressive but mostly because the FlyPort (the OpenPicus wireless sensor node) is featuring a WiFi module and a Webserver (according to them our WoT community influenced them on that point) which makes it a nice, compliant, Web of Things device. 😉
No breaking news in this post, but we were just informed about the fact that one of our articles was in the special selection of Service Oriented Computing of IEEE Computing now as well as Featured on ZDNet. We never really talked about this work because it largely discusses WS-* services (DPWS in particular) which are also known as “evil-services” by the RESTifarians 😀 We actually began our IoT journey with DPWS, were quite frustrated with it, but it evolved a lot since then, became an official OASIS standard, and thanks to the crew of WS4D became a lot less...
A few weeks ago we described our framework for making the standard RFID network (EPC Network) part of the Web of Things. We are happy to announce that the framework was accepted to be part of the leading Open Source RFID infrastructure (Fosstrak) and is available on the Fosstrak forge. In order to foster adoption we created two useful resources, in the user and developer guide you’ll find a detailed description of the API and install procedure (basically 4 clicks if you already have a running Tomcat instance). Additionally, an introduction video details the features of the framework and showcases...
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...
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...
Here is part 2, part one is here. One Web, Yoan Blanc, doSimple. We thought of a single uniform web. Banana phone, with WAP. Now we have tons of devices that try to surf the Web and they all want the same level of experience (mobile browser market share version 1.0 image). Discusses the <meta viewport>, that allows it to fit on many mobile devices (he talks about ppk, peter paul koch who does testing of mobile browsers). Testing: MicroEmulator runs opera mini. You don’t need an iPhone app! Html is enough. You can also use manifest.cache to specify what...
A few days ago, I was kindly invited by Gerd Kortuem to give a lecture on the Web of Things for students of Lancaster University. The talk was given in frame of a “Software Innovation and Entrepreneurship” lecture. Thus, the students had both business and technical backgrounds. I quite enjoyed giving it especially since the students asked very relevant questions on aspects such as security, discovery, the real-time Web, etc. You can find a full recording (about 1.5 hours) of the lecture here, but you’ll need to install the plug-in to watch it (sorry about that!). Alternatively you can find...
Fresh out of the box, COAP draft is available since ahem… a couple of hours (self-pride for my timing as you can notice). This is definitely for me, us, and you all a definite pace for mankind – a solid and viable proof that the WoT is coming, and a very nice Christmas present. What is COAP I hear you saying? From the draft: The use of web services on the Internet has become ubiquitous in most applications, and depends on the basic REST architecture of the web. The proposed Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE) working group aims at extending the...
As all of you know, one of the core concept of the Web of Things is design of RESTful things, that is having embedded devices proposing their services in a Resource-Oriented manner. Today, once again, somebody was asking me but what is exactly a resource? Well good question! We all know (hem) what an Object is in Object Oriented Programming, we all know (hem HEM, yeah right!) what a service is in Service Oriented Architectures but what is a resource in a ROA? I had this discussion with a good friend of mine (and a very good OO architect!) let’s...
