News

Eclipse-Based IoT Development Projects Launched

• By David Ramel
• June 17, 2016

Four new open source releases for building Internet of Things (IoT) projects have been launched by a working group hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, known for its popular, extensible IDE for Java coding.

The projects were announced by the Eclipse Internet of Things Working Group, an open source community that provides resources to help developers build IoT solutions based on core open source technologies and open standards. The group provides open source implementations of IoT protocols -- CoAP, ETSI SmartM2M, MQTT and LwM2M -- and backs extensible services and frameworks to foster the development of IoT applications with open APIs.

The four projects include:

• Eclipse Kura 2.0, a framework for building IoT gateways. The new 2.0 release features a new responsive UI, support for multiple cloud connections and an improved onboarding process "with new tools and code samples to ease the creation of Kura applications and drag-and-drop deployment of Kura apps available from the Eclipse Marketplace." It also has better integration with Apache Camel for declarative message routing.
  
  
• Eclipse Paho 1.2, for client-based implementations of the MQTT and MQTT-SN messaging protocols. The 1.2 release updates client libraries for Java, Python, JavaScript, C, .NET, Android and Embedded C/C++. It also features automatic reconnect and offline buffering for the C, Java and Android clients; a new Go client; and WebSocket support.
  
  
• Eclipse SmartHome 0.8, a framework for creating smart home solutions focusing on heterogeneous environments, designed for embedded devices like Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black and Intel Edison. The new 0.8 release features a new REST API; more bindings to support new devices; a new OSGi EnOcean Base Driver from Orange Labs; and a new rule engine, "a very flexible and powerful framework that supports templates for beginners, JavaScript for automation rules and graphical rule editors, contributed by ProSyst."
  
  
• Eclipse OM2M 1.0, which implements the oneM2M standard, providing horizontal IoT services to foster the development of IoT solutions that are independent from underlying networks. The OM2M 1.0 implementation features an OSGi-based modular platform architecture that's extensible; a lightweight REST API "exposed through multiple communication bindings including HTTP and CoAP protocols and supporting various content formats such as XML and JSON"; and flexible data storage.

The group also announced a new project proposal, dubbed Eclipse Kapua. It's described as "a new open source project proposal from Eurotech to create a modular integration platform for IoT devices and smart sensors, that aims to bridge operation technology with information technology. Eclipse Kapua focuses on managing edge IoT nodes including their connectivity, configuration, and application life cycle. It also allows to aggregate real-time data streams from the edge, either archiving them or routing them towards enterprise IT systems and applications."

The Eclipse IoT community has more than 200 active contributors, the group said, who work on 24 separate projects composed of more than 2 million lines of code, which have been downloaded more than 500,000 times. The Eclipse IoT Working Group is made up of 30 member companies.