The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently gained massive traction. IoT challenges enterprises, small companies, and developers with new problems to solve. While HTTP is the de facto protocol for the human web, communication between machines at scale requires a paradigm shift — steering away from request/response and leading toward publish/subscribe. This is where the ultra-lightweight, massively scalable, open, and easy-to-implement MQTT protocol enters the picture.
In this Refcard, we dive into what MQTT is and how it works, including brokers, client libraries, and more.
After the evolution of distributed systems, microservices-based applications attracted the interest of nearly every organization wanting to grow with time and survive the market competition. Microservices allows us to scale and manage systems easily. Development time reduced due to distributed effort among many teams and time-to-market new features reduced significantly.
Due to distributed nature, communication among different components is over the network. And there are so many factors that can affect communication, either it can be security, added latency, or abrupt termination of ongoing communication, leading to increased infrastructure cost. Hence either we can fix the network, which exists with numerous problems or we can architect our system to be resilient and reliable over time.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover landing was a historic moment. It was the first time we saw those moments of a rover landing on Mars. That event was huge for many people watching this on their screens and it will inspire us for years.
Every single image we saw after this landing contains a new surprise and one of those were talks about hidden message found on the NASA Mars rover parachute.
Do you want to implement an HTTP server, but do you not want to take any risk of writing a full-fledged HTTP server? Developing an HTTP server with full capability is not a trivial task. But Java has got a solution to this kind of problem. Java supports an in-built HTTP server. By just writing 100 lines of code, we can develop a somewhat-decent HTTP server that can handle HTTP GET and POST requests. We can also leverage it to handle other HTTP commands as well.
HTTPServer class
Java SDK provides an in-built server called HttpServer. This class belongs to com.sun.net package.
This week, Andy Standford-Clark announced in a tweet the 20th anniversary of the first MQTT release. In those 20 years, it is clear that MQTT has become the de-facto standard for IoT. All major IoT cloud providers support MQTT, many popular IoT Platform vendors support MQTT, and survey results show MQTT is widely used for building IoT applications.
An interesting question to ask is “Why has MQTT has been successful?” What were the factors that led to the MQTT domination of IoT?
Choosing the right IoT connectivity protocol for your device can feel pretty straight-forward. Most assume that Wi-Fi is best for indoor deployments, while cellular connectivity is best for outdoor deployments.
However, it’s not so black and white. Our team finds that customers underestimate the advantages and disadvantages for certain radio technologies. In some cases, we actually recommend cellular protocols to companies who are planning to deploy indoors. That’s because cellular IoT connectivity protocols can be easier to set up, provide better reliability, and allow the maker of the device to be in control of the data.
Over the past decade, we have witnessed the emergence of revolutionary innovation, of which the evolutionary significance is yet to be fully recognized. Of course, we’re referring to the blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and, more generally, the phenomenon that we describe as the Internet of Value. Blockchain and related technologies have the opportunity to transform the world of finance and other value systems, in exactly the manner by which the Internet has transformed the way we exchange information.
There have been some key milestones leading up to this point: the launch of Bitcoin in 2008; the emergence of altcoins from 2011 onwards; the launch of Ethereum in 2015. We call this Layer 1 — the foundational level — with the economic function of value creation and the technical one of ensuring the basic functionality of accounting and transfer of crypto assets. All of this is implemented on the basis of distributed registries and with the conditions of interaction strictly regulated at the code level.
