Eclipse Foundation encourages the grow of Eclipse Working Groups, that are formed to facilitate collaboration between companies and organizations, to focus, promote and augment Eclipse technologies on a certain topic. In this article we’ll speach about Eclipse M2M Working Group, that is a collaboration of companies and organizations focused on developing open source protocols, frameworks, and tools for M2M software development.

The goal of the Eclipse M2M Working Group is to make it easy for software developers to create M2M applications that are based on open standards and open source technology.

Here a list of the projects from this group, with a brief description.

  • Mihini The initial code contribution, provided by Sierra Wireless, is now available for Mihini. Mihini, a Lua-based framework for M2M gateways, provides connectivity management to ensure reliable network connection, provides an abstraction layer for underlying hardware and protocols, and enables the smart transmission of data between devices and servers.
  • Paho provides open source implementations of the proposed OASIS MQTT protocol. In the last six months Paho has received community contributions for MQTT client implementations in Python, JavaScript, and Objective-C.
  • Koneki is a Lua-based IDE with its first official 1.0 production release included as part of Kepler, the annual Eclipse release train. Koneki 1.0 featured updated support for the new Lua 5.2 runtime and new remote development support for the Mihini framework.

Four new open source projects are being proposed to join the Eclipse M2M community:

  • Ponte is a framework (built in Javascript with node.js) that will allow reading and writing of data from sensors and actuators via M2M protocols, accessible via a REST API. Ponte will also provide the ability to convert and exchange data between protocols. The initial protocols that will be supported include MQTT (a proposed OASIS standard) and CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol). Eclipse Paho hosts the reference implementation of MQTT.
  • Eclipse SCADA is an open source implementation of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system typically used to monitor and control large scale industrial processes, e.g. solar farms. Eclipse SCADA will provide connectivity to a variety of industrial devices, a monitoring system to create alarms and events, recording of historical data and a framework to build custom user interfaces and visualizations on top of those functions.
  • Concierge is an implementation of the OSGi core specifications that is well suited for embedded and mobile devices. Concierge will target a footprint with a jar file size of less than 400KB, allowing it to run on devices that have limited resources.
  • Kura is a Java and OSGi based application framework for M2M service gateways. Kura will provide a set of common services for Java developers building M2M applications, including I/O access, data services, network configuration and remote management.

Last but not least, there are rumors on a new project that comes from openHab!!

We’ll see… stay tuned!

Update: The rumors were true: here the link to Eclipse SmartHome proposal.