The Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) will support Java developers working on IoT applications by providing a new toolkit of core services for connecting and managing IoT devices. According to the Eclipse Foundation, the group tasked with managing the open-source IDE, the new software stack will make IoT development much easier by providing multi-language programming support.
Speaking at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich said the Open IoT Stack for Java will simplify IoT development by letting developers reuse the core set of Eclipse frameworks in their IoT projects. Basically, this adds simplified IoT programming capabilities to a platform that has been developed to make multi-language programming much more straightforward – allowing a developer to easily port an app to different platforms.
The Open IoT Stack is essentially a set of Java programming frameworks and OSGi (Open Service Gateway initiative) services that includes support to link the Java environment and language with the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Lightweight M2M, Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) environments – as well as a set of industrial frameworks for SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) for home automation and factory automation.
“We are announcing that the Eclipse Foundation is working toward creating an IoT Java platform specifically targeted at connecting and managing devices. Our goal with this is to ensure that Java developers have a free and open source platform for building IoT solutions. The IoT is a huge opportunity,” spoke Milinkovich, who added that in IoT discussions the focus is usually placed on the billions of devices or trillions of dollars, rather than on the millions of programmers that are required.
“IoT is a huge opportunity, and it is obviously attracting an enormous amount of investment and an enormous amount of hype,” Milinkovich said to eWeek. “But I definitely believe that the core infrastructure pieces of the IoT have to be based on open source. Part of the reason that’s true is simply because any other business model won’t scale to tens of billions of device gateways, much like how CompuServe failed because it could not scale to the internet.”
Oracle, the company that owns Java-parent Sun Microsystems, is renewing its drive to market Java as the platform for small device and IoT developers, hoping to persuade developers at the JavaOne conference to focus on using the language for smaller devices than they may be used to – despite Oracle’s Chief Java Architect Mark Reinhold admitting that Java doesn’t scale well onto smaller devices yet at the conference, before promising to combat this shortcoming. Oracle also announced an early-access version of Java Micro Edition Embedded 8.1, which will support ARM’s M3 and M4 microcontrollers, and a developer preview for Freescale’s FRDM K64 dev-boards with support for ARM’s mbed (see separate piece).
The 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.
Milinkovich said that the Open IoT Stack already had the support of 2lemetry, Actuate, Bitreactive, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, DC-Square, Eurotech, ibh Systems, IBM, LAAS-CNRS, openHAB, Sierra Wireless and Ubuntu.