Blueberry Coder

As the Eclipse Foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary, its annual developer conference is reborn under a new name: Open Community Experience (OCX). With the new name come a new city (Mainz, Germany), and a fresh new concept for the event. One thing that does not change is the focus on the various developer communities that make the broader Eclipse ecosystem. Naturally, Java and Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) will have a prominent place. That’s why they get their own co-located events in Open Community for Java and Open Community for Automotive . But the organisers remembered the embedded and IoT community. We are getting our own track inside the main OCX event! Here are three Embedded and IoT topics I expect (and hope) will take a lot of place in the track’s program: 1. Sparkplug and the Unified Namespace (UNS) Since it became an international standard in 2023, Sparkplug continued to advance. Our recent white paper on the business value of Sparkplug shows how this Eclipse open ...

This week, the Eclipse Foundation announced that the Sparkpug® 3.0 specification has been published as an International Standard. That sounds impressive. But what does it mean, exactly? And how will this impact the evolution of Sparkplug? To answer this question, let’s take a step back and consider what standards are. The technology industry loves standards. For example, USB is a set of standards managed by the USB Implementers Forum, Inc. (USB-IF), a non-profit corporation founded by the companies that developed the USB specification. The Eclipse Foundation describes Jakarta EE as a standard: a set of  specifications for enterprise Java application development. In the IoT and Industrial Automation world, OASIS Open also presents the MQTT protocol as a standard. However, standards play a much more pervasive role in society. There are standards for building homes and others that define how cars should work. Standards permeate our lives. To understand the significance of this ...

I am delighted today to announce that Sparkplug won an IoT Edge Computing Excellence Award from IoT Evolution ! This achievement underscores the growing maturity of the specification and its relevance to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Congratulations to the committers and contributors of the Sparkplug specification project! From the announcement:  This award recognizes the companies emerging as leaders in the growing edge computing space. Companies selected for this award have proven that their products are enabling advanced IoT deployments by offering edge solutions that bring real-time computing, data availability, analytics, AI and machine learning to edge devices. Edge Nodes play a fundamental role in Sparkplug. Version 3.0 of the specification defines them as any MQTT Client application that manages an MQTT Session and provides the physical or logical gateway functions required to participate in the Sparkplug topic namespace and leverage its payload definit...

Most of what we do at the Eclipse Foundation happens in public. Our mailing lists and code repositories are open to all. Anyone can freely download, modify, and redistribute our code and slide decks with little to no strings attached. This kind of openness is the mark of truly successful ecosystems. However, one persistent problem for our open source committers and contributors is the lack of information about who uses the code they write and for what purpose. This lack of information is a significant disadvantage from a product and project management perspective. It is easier to prioritize new features or bug fixes when you know who uses your code and for what purpose. Moreover, our committers and contributors are keen to engage with their user community to discuss their roadmap and solicit feedback. While this is a persistent and hard-to-solve problem, there are two easy things you can do to help. Both will require only a few minutes of your time. The first is to show your support fo...

Over ten years ago, the Eclipse Foundation launched the Eclipse IoT working group . MQTT was one of the pillars of that launch. The first three projects were Eclipse Paho , a collection of MQTT clients, Eclipse Mosquitto , an MQTT broker, and Eclipse Kura , a Java/OSGi solution for IoT gateways that supports the protocol. To say that MQTT is in our genes would be an understatement. Since then, usage of MQTT has grown significantly. Year after year, the simple yet powerful publish/subscribe protocol is the most widely used IoT-specific protocol in our annual developer surveys . For example, in the 2021 edition, 44% of respondents stated they are using it. We like to think we are at least partly responsible for that. By the way, our 2022 survey is currently underway; you have until June 15, 2022, to participate. Click here to share your insights after finishing this post, of course. IBM has been a key player in our MQTT ecosystem for a long time. In 2021, the company brought its commit...

I have a fantastic job. When people ask what I do, I say I manage IoT and Edge Computing programs at the Eclipse Foundation. This is true yet is an oversimplification. What I actually do is a bit more complicated than that. I need to keep an eye on over fifty relevant Eclipse open-source projects. At the same time, I help animate three distinct communities: the Eclipse IoT , Edge Native , and Sparkplug working groups. All three have something to do with IoT and Edge Computing, each with a slightly different angle. And here is my problem: it is hard to convey all the nuances of everything our IoT and Edge community does in a single word. IoT, of course, includes Edge Computing. Deploying compute, storage, and networking resources as close to the source of the data as possible makes complete sense. However, Edge Computing is an architecture that applies to many other use cases, such as gaming or videoconferencing. None of those two concepts completely encloses the other. And no sing...