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!

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!

As part of that change, a number of things have been added “behind the scenes” on mqtt.org, including a new Get Involved page listing the different places where conversations happen – including a new MQTT discussion group that will be properly launched shortly. There’s also a new Twitter ID, @mqttorg, where site updates and other news is being posted.

The site design has been freshened slightly (including a nicer mobile interface), and the upper menu will be reorganized soon to make sure that the Get Involved community page is visible. Expect more use to be made of the wiki in future, too. There has been a huge growth in interest in the use of the protocol over the past few weeks, and it would be great if more people could share their experiences on the wiki and in the different discussion areas. Remember to let us know if you are doing anything cool with MQTT – tag your tweets #mqtt to make sure you get our attention!

One final piece of news… if you are in the UK and interested in learning more about MQTT then you should check out the free 1-day messaging PubSub Huddle on September 23rd, where MQTT will be one of the technologies being discussed.

Lucy Zhang, a software engineer at Facebook, has written about their new Facebook Messenger app:

One of the problems we experienced was long latency when sending a message. The method we were using to send was reliable but slow, and there were limitations on how much we could improve it. With just a few weeks until launch, we ended up building a new mechanism that maintains a persistent connection to our servers. To do this without killing battery life, we used a protocol called MQTT that we had experimented with in Beluga. MQTT is specifically designed for applications like sending telemetry data to and from space probes, so it is designed to use bandwidth and batteries sparingly. By maintaining an MQTT connection and routing messages through our chat pipeline, we were able to often achieve phone-to-phone delivery in the hundreds of milliseconds, rather than multiple seconds.

You can read her full post here.

[edit: of course, MQTT has also been used to build a Facebook "presence" device before, by our friends at Isidorey, but this new deployment inside Facebook is obviously something with much broader reach!]

Today, we’re delighted to announce that the specification will be moved toward formal standardization. Since so many groups, communities, and individual developers have expressed an interest, we’re also very excited to make this process open for anyone to join:

The MQTT protocol specification, in the public domain since 1999, was published under royalty free terms in 2010. New M2M solutions, fuelled by exponential growth in wireless device connections, bring the need for reliable and scalable messaging. To support industry growth and ensure open connectivity, Eurotech and IBM are planning to bring the MQTT protocol to a standards organization. We welcome your interest and participation in this standardization initiative.

You can download the full announcement (PDF), which includes details of who to contact in order to get involved.

He’s even included a thorough set of sample code and some detailed thoughts on how to optimise the way the application uses the Android system APIs. It is a great reference!

It doesn’t end there. Developers have been using MQTT and Android together for a while now. Ben Hardill created a simple Android app for monitoring the state of his TV. As well as that, the new Android device ADK, Android@Home, and the emergence of cool cloud services like Isidorey (another new addition to the Software page) that support MQTT natively, enable some extremely cool things. Folks continue to bridge cloud services like Pachube with MQTT, too – there’s great synergy there.

In the same way that the MQTT protocol has been ideal for minimising data usage on sensor networks in the past, it is a perfect partner for mobile applications, too.

… so… webOS or Windows Phone samples next, anyone?

Andy created the Lua library as part of his work on the Aiko platform, a way of joining up the Internet of Things being created thanks to Open Source hardware like Arduino and the ability to run Linux on platforms like OpenWRT. He also notes that it will run on a Playstation Portable! In theory it should also be possible to run on other platforms that support Lua scripting such as Android using the Android Scripting Layer (although some work might be needed to add the library to the SL4A environment).

The Software page now lists the client APIs in alphabetical order of language implementation, with the exception of the 2 device-specific implementations for Arduino and mbed. As the note at the top of the section says…

… not all of the client APIs … are current. Some are at an early or experimental stage of development, whilst others are stable and mature … some may not provide full support for all of the features of the latest MQTT specification.

It continues to be great to see developers working with the protocol and providing their APIs for others in the community to use. We’re happy to list them here on mqtt.org, so please let us know if you are working on anything that should be shared. Thanks for your contributions!

Related: the mosquitto blog has been updated with a post about the Lua client.

The MQonTV channel on YouTube also now has a nice video which talks about how MQTT can be used to connect the Internet of Things and a Smarter Planet. Take a look!

Finally, in case you missed them, MQTT was featured in a couple of IBM podcasts over the past 12 months. Check out the developerWorks podcast series, and the Connectivity and Integration podcasts (MQTT is featured in episode #3).

We’ve added the mbed client to the list of available clients on the Software page. If you are working on an implementation for a different platform, or just have an alternative to one that is already out there, do let us know so we can keep the community updated.