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Eclipse IoT

Unveiling the Eclipse IoT Demo Box

Now that the holiday season is over, we’re fully into “conference season” mode, as the fall is packed with IoT conferences (look at our Events Calendar to see where we will have a presence in the next couple months). Last week, the Eclipse Foundation was exhibiting at M2M Summit with three of our member companies: Logi.cals, Generative Software and Bitreactive (who blogged about it).

Since the number of Eclipse IoT projects keeps growing (we’re approaching 20!), it is sometimes difficult for people to quickly understand the problems each of these projects are trying to solve. While we’ve been pretty successful with the “Greenhouse demo™” over the past few years, this is a rather limited use case, and it does not really allow to showcase some of our newest projects.

This is why I started to create a new setup for Eclipse IoT demos, that I hope will be adopted by everyone interested in having an easy to setup platform for explaining what Eclipse IoT is all about. You should read this article until the end if you want to learn how to replicate this setup yourself!

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Eclipse IoT

3 hardware platforms of choice to get started with Eclipse IoT

When you prototype IoT solutions, it becomes necessary very early in your development phase to use an actual embedded platform to run your software, and to test it in an environment that is as close as possible of what you expect your production environment to be.

As I’m sure you know, there are lots of hardware prototyping platforms out there. In this article you will learn about three very popular options (from the cheapest/tiniest to the most capable) that can help you get started with Eclipse IoT projects in no time, and get pointers to useful docs and tutorials to make the initial setup as simple as possible!

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Categories
Eclipse IoT

Growing an open community:
3 interesting facts about Eclipse IoT

About 9 months ago, I published a blog post showing up some interesting metrics about the Eclipse IoT open-source community.

I have recently crunched the numbers again and here are 3 interesting facts about Eclipse IoT and its developer community:

A very diverse community of contributors

iot facts-01

It is one thing to develop open source IoT technology (and Eclipse is definitely not the only organization working on it) but it’s quite another thing to do this in a transparent and open manner.

At Eclipse IoT, over the last year, 125 different developers have been writing code and fixing bugs. What’s more, they come from 20+ different organizations, demonstrating that open collaboration is not only possible, it is key to ensure technology adoption and long-term support.
Leading the charge in terms of numbers of developers are: Eurotech, IBM, Sierra Wireless, LAAS-CNRS and Deutsche Telekom. Other companies involved include: Intel, IBH Systems, Cisco, itemis, innoQ, …

A solid and growing code base

iot facts-02

The Eclipse IoT portfolio is very rich (from protocols implementations, to frameworks for building IoT gateways, to tools and libraries for industrial automation), so it is no surprise that we now have a very solid code base, with over 1.8 million lines of code (yes, you read that right!).

It is also interesting to see the progression over the years, demonstrating that a majority of the projects are under actual development.

eclipse-iot-code-progression

A wide range of supported languages and platforms

iot facts-03

Not very surprisingly, as many of our projects target smart IoT gateways at the edge of the network, we have a predominance of Java in our code repositories (~70%), but our 1.8 million lines of code also contains lots of C/C++ (10%) as several of our projects target constrained embedded environments. You will also find Python, Javascript, Lua, or Go, as projects like e.g. Paho try to provide implementations across as many platforms/languages as possible.
So while we believe Java is important for IoT, in particular due to the very large ecosystem of developers familiar with it across the whole IT industry, we also recognize the importance of being language agnostic to make sure that IoT developers have access to good open source libraries for their platform of choice.

I would really like to hear your comments on these findings, and would be happy to discuss how this relates to your current experiences in the world of IoT. Feel free to use the comments below!

Note: most of the metrics related to Eclipse IoT are readily accessible from our dashboard. Some extra analysis of the source code repositories has been conducted to e.g. compute the lines of codes.