MQ Telemetry Transport

A big day for MQTT… “the little protocol that could”?

Back in August, we mentioned the intent to take MQTT to a standards body – that process is in progress.

On November 2, IBM and Eurotech, the originators of the MQTT protocol specification, announced that they were joining Sierra Wireless and the Eclipse Foundation in a new Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Industry Working Group at Eclipse. Sierra Wireless have already contributed M2M frameworks and tooling to the proposed Eclipse Koneki project.

Today, November 3, IBM and Eurotech also announced the donation of Java and C MQTT clients to the newly-proposed Eclipse Paho M2M messaging project.

What does this mean? Well, to start off with, the IBM Java and C clients will be donated to the Paho project. The project proposal defines the ongoing scope as:

…to provide open source implementations of open and standard messaging protocols that support current and emerging requirements of M2M integration with Web and Enterprise middleware and applications.  It will include client implementations for use on embedded platforms along with corresponding server support as determined by the community.

In order for M2M device and client developers to integrate, develop and test messaging components end-to-end, Paho will address the development of frameworks and sample code needed to support testing and development of end-to-end device connectivity with a server. The project will make these available in an Eclipse M2M sever “sandbox”, as recommended by the Eclipse M2M Industry Working Group.

The Paho project scope includes the development of tooling that will support effective use, integration and testing of the messaging components.

This has created a lot of buzz, as tweets and articles we’ve been seeing today confirm. It’s great news, and we encourage everyone to join the Google Group for more discussion on the future of MQTT, or to watch the progress of Eclipse Paho and other related projects as they develop.

As always – we also thank everyone involved in the MQTT community for their passion and interest – it’s just amazing that there are so many implementations out there already. Here’s to the M2M space powered by MQTT!

I presented on MQTT today at the PubSub Huddle event in London – a developer meetup for all those interested in messaging topics. 0MQ, RabbitMQ, SockJS (websockets) and other projects were all represented. You can watch the video of the talk on the Skills Matter website.

The talk included a short demo of how great MQTT can be to connect up tiny devices like Arduinos – I had my Arduino with a temperature sensor and an XRF module passed around the audience, and showed MQTT publishing the data via a simple Python script to my Really Small Message Broker. We also did a live link-up to an automated home system in IBM and showed that being controlled using MQTT over the web. Later in the afternoon I had a Wifly shield attached with the MQTT client running on the board, and clients running in C, Java, node.js, Python, and an Android app receiving the data concurrently.

There’s a real buzz around messaging at the moment, and it was great to see so many different people at the event. Lots of interesting folks around – including the author of the Perl and Ruby MQTT clients, Nicholas Humfrey. One piece of news from him is that the Ruby gem now has a new home on Github, so it’s worth checking out there if you are interested.

Finally – our new discussion group is up-and-running so do join us there if you’d like to talk about any MQTT-related topics!

A brief note to point out that MQTT is now represented by an entry on Wikipedia (thanks to one of our user community, @abusule) – feel free to help to maintain the information, and add citations and references as relevant.