Eclipse Foundation Unveils Open IoT Stack for Java

• By John K. Waters
• September 30, 2014

The Eclipse Foundation took the wraps off its new Internet of Things (IoT) Stack for Java at this year's JavaOne conference, underway this week in San Francisco.

The stack comprises a set of Java frameworks and OSGi services that allow developers to connect and manage solutions for the Internet of Things. The open-source development platform for consumer and enterprise IoT systems supports a number of standards, including OASIS MQTT, IETF CoAP, and), along with a set of services for building IoT gateways.

The core IoT Stack combines projects from the Eclipse IoT initiative: Paho, which provides a Java implementation of the MQTT client; Moquette, a Java MQTT broker; Californium, which is a Java implementation of CoAP (including DTLS for IoT security); Leshan, which provides a Java implementation of the OMA Lightweight M2M standard; and Kura, a set of OSGi services for building IoT Gateways.

It also includes the Eclipse Smarthome set of Java and OSGi services for building smart home and assisted living solutions; Eclipse SCADA, which is a set of Java and OSGi services that implements many of the services required for a SCADA industrial automation system; and   Eclipse OM2M, an implementation of the ETSI M2M standard.

Ian Skerrett, the Foundation's vice president of marketing, has been leading the Eclipse IoT initiative is to establish an open IoT/M2M platform and build an open-source community around IoT. "There's some daunting complexity here, but we know that when you create frameworks and abstraction levels in software, it becomes much easier to put together these types of solutions," he told ADTmag in an earlier interview (See "The Internet of Things Needs Open Source.")

The Open IoT Stack for Java is already supported by a community of companies, universities, and research institutions, including:  2lemetry, Actuate Corporation, Bitreactive, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, DC-Square, Eurotech, ibh Systems, IBM, LAAS-CNRS, openHAB, Ubuntu, Sierra Wireless and 2lemetry,

The challenge for the evolving IoT community, says Nobby Akiha, senior vice president of marketing at longtime Eclipse Foundation member Actuate, is the establishment of standards to make effective use of the many different sources of data. "Eclipse's new Open IoT Stack for Java will make it easier for the over 3.5 million BIRT developers to access, visualize and analyze IoT data to deliver actionable information to enhance customer experience and improve operations," he said in a statement.