Blogs

The third edition of the Open IoT Challenge officially started one week ago. More than 80 teams have submitted their entries and are now in the running to win the Open IoT Challenge 3.0!

Participants have about three months to complete their solution and show the world how open source and open standards can help build innovative IoT solutions. On February 27, they will have to submit their final project report and hope that their work ends up in the top 3 winning solutions.

At EclipseCon Europe I spent a few minutes chatting with István Ráth from IncQuery Labs. He was demoing a pretty awesome set of development tools for safety-critical domains (here: railway inter-locking system), and showing how to use them in combination with some cool Eclipse IoT Projects such as Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Mosquitto.

Today we announced a collaboration between Bosch, Red Hat and Eurotech to begin the work to create interoperable IoT components for an IoT cloud platform. This is the first step towards creating an open source IoT cloud platform that I hope one day will become the defacto implementation for IoT solutions, similar to Apache http for web applications.

Eclipse IoT has just published a white paper that, although I’m obviously biased, is a nice read for anyone looking at understanding today’s IoT architectures, and the role that open source plays by providing some of the key software building blocks needed for impl

One of my favourite literary quotes comes from Canadian author, Hugh MacLennan.

“But that night as I drove back to Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.” ― Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night

The Eclipse IoT community has grown considerably over the last 12 months. More importantly we have expanded the breadth of technology to include software that runs on devices, at the edge and the cloud. We have also learnt a lot about the software functionality required to build an IoT solution.

The source for the Eclipse Project Handbook is in AsciiDoc format (rendered using Asciidoctor via Maven), and includes embedded Graphviz graph descriptions (which are rendered into embedded images). Proofing those images is a bit of a pain: it requires that I actually build the handbook and use a browser to view the results.

Bugzilla has served the Eclipse Community well for many years, easily scaling to serve the needs of over 500 open source projects, servicing a community of thousands of software developers generating half of a million issue reports over close to two decades (I’m taking some liberties with that last one: it’s been about 17 years). When I say “easily”, I mean that our world-class IT team has made it look easy.

Update: Note that as of October 11/2017, Java 9 is 100% supported “out of the box” by Eclipse IDE, Oxygen Edition; Java 9 can be used to run your Eclipse IDE, Oxygen Edition, and can be used to build Java 9 applications without additional configuration. Download or update today.

Note that this post is not intended to be a status update; it’s just a quick update based on some experimenting that I’ve been doing with the beta code.