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 week