The purpose of the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) Technical Committee is to define an open publish/subscribe protocol for telemetry messaging designed to be open, simple, lightweight, and suited for use in constrained networks and multi-platform environments. The TC will accomplish this purpose through the refinement of an input specification.

The intention is to use the current MQTT v3.1 specification as the input to the Technical Committee and incorporate clarifications that the community has been curating on the wiki.

The deadline for joining the process is March 18th 2013 – please take part if this is of interest to you and/or your organisation.

First up a few months ago was Andy, with his appearance at TEDx Warwick in the UK – “Innovation begins at Home”

More recently, Arlen went on stage at TEDx New Bedford in the US – “The Internet of Things is Just Getting Started”

Both videos are worth watching to get some insight into what these guys are working on, thinking about, and (in part) how MQTT came about!

What do you think? Tweet us @mqttorg and let us know your views!

Here’s the abstract:

MQTT is a connectivity protocol designed for M2M. It is an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport that is ideal for connecting small devices connected on networks with minimal bandwidth. The Eclipse Paho project is the reference implementation for the MQTT protocol. This webinar will introduce developers to MQTT and then show how you can develop your very first MQTT based application using Paho and the Eclipse IDE.

So, just to recap – free education, provided by some of the leading developers in the MQTT community. Sign up and get it in your calendar!

(oh, and the other talks in the series are also worth joining – they have already covered the goals of the M2M efforts at Eclipse, and the anatomy of an M2M application, with more technical talks to come!)

Mosquitto 1.x

After a couple of years in development, the popular fully Open Source MQTT broker, mosquitto by Roger Light, hit version 1.0. Check out the long list of enhancements in the announcement post, including comprehensive SSL/TLS support, better password management, a rewritten pure Python client, a Javascript/websockets client, and “masses of bug fixes”. A couple of additional point releases followed quickly after the major release, so it’s looking very polished. Roger has given a lot of time to the MQTT community, so if you use mosquitto please let him know – and why not donate, as a thank you for all his hard work? There’s a link to do so on the mosquitto homepage.

(even) More brokers

The Software page has been updated to list a number of new server/broker implementations including Apache ActiveMQ and Apollo, and the just-announced RabbitMQ adapter for MQTT. The latter is particularly exciting, as it offers interoperability between the AMQP and MQTT protocols.

As there are a number of publically-accessible brokers now, we’ve made a list so that you can get testing with MQTT more quickly. We’ve also started to look at protocol compliance / completeness on a new page on the wiki – please help to update this page (and all of the wiki!).

update: moments after posting this, moquette-mqtt also released an early version of a new Java broker implementation. Worth a look.

More software

Beyond the brokers, we now have more clients (new Javascript, Objective-C, Python APIs) listed; and some client tools for testing, such as the excellent mqtt.io.

Facebook apps using (more) MQTT

A year after Facebook first went public about their use of MQTT within Facebook Messenger, the new native iOS Facebook app also credits the libmosquitto library and their blog post mentions that they are using MQTT extensively for notifications and updates. This has led to analysts like James Governor and news outlets like ReadWriteWeb writing pieces on the change. Of course, the endpoints themselves are not public – but that’s not the point.  It’s a good use of the protocol (it is efficient on battery, CPU and network in mobile scenarios), and it’s a great validation for the use case.

Eclipse Paho and Eclipse M2M Portal

The Eclipse Paho project is the primary home of the reference MQTT clients that started at IBM. Paho is a core project inside the Eclipse M2M Industry Working Group. The Java and C clients are being cleaned up, there is a nice Eclipse view for testing, and a Lua client has been contributed, so progress is being made. As of today, there’s also a brand new portal where developers can go to find their way around the projects, frameworks, and resources provided by the M2M initiative at Eclipse. You’ll find MQTT featured on the Protocols page, and a Sandbox page which discusses how to connect to the test broker provided by Eclipse.

MQTT, the book

IBM published a Redbook, Building Smarter Planet Solutions with MQTT and IBM WebSphere MQ Telemetry. This should be a great read both for those wanting to learn the basics of MQTT, and also those looking to integrate with WebSphere MQ. Redbooks are very comprehensive and this one weighs in at 268 pages, available for free in PDF and Ebook formats. Take a look.

• MQTT on Google Groups – this is mostly where discussion of the protocol itself happen, along with the broader ecosystem of implementations and use cases. Much of what is discussed in the Google Group is used to clarify the specification and improve the wiki.
• mosquitto-users on Launchpad (formerly mqtt-users) - owned by the mosquitto project, so this is primarily for discussion of issues and questions around the mosquitto broker.
• paho-dev Eclipse list – for implementation specifics on Eclipse Paho code (the new home of the “reference” C and Java clients) and future requirements.
• m2m-iwg Eclipse list – Machine-to-Machine Industry Working Group topics ie those spanning Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Koneki. The goal is to avoid too many project-specific discussions here but to look at the broader initiatives of the IWG.

Users of all of the lists are generally very friendly and can help you to navigate between them, but I just thought it would be useful to explain the “main purpose” of each group. Discussions are not limited to mailing lists and happen on Twitter, in IRC, and across the web. We try to follow as many of them as possible! There’s an additional list on the Community page.

For more about MQTT and the relationship to Eclipse, check our wiki page MQTT at Eclipse. For more on mosquitto, check out that project’s excellent website!

To get your repository publishing, find your way to its admin page.

From there, under the Service Hooks tab, select the MqttPub hook in the list to bring up the configuration options.

The options speak for themselves, but there are some handy notes provided to help you figure it out. Be sure to check the ‘active’ box before hitting Update Settings.

With that done, you should start to get messages published whenever something is committed to the repository. The message itself is a json blob that contains all of the information about the commit that you could possible want.

You can read more about the contents of the blob on GitHub’s Post-Receive Hooks help page.

What is Eclipse Paho? There’s a page on the wiki about this, but in brief, it’s part of a broader machine-to-machine (M2M) initiative at the Eclipse Foundation. Code is licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

For more on Paho, take a look at the project page and project wiki at Eclipse, which include links to the core paho-dev mailing list, Bugzilla, and the code repository where the C and Java clients can be found. Binary downloads will follow in future. There is also a public test broker instance at m2m.eclipse.org. An update on progress on the Paho project has been posted on Slideshare.

Other news at EclipseCon included demonstrations by Sierra Wireless of an end-to-end application using the Eclipse Koneki Lua Development Tools receiving data from Arduino sensors, via an MQTT broker to an Android application; a demonstration of the Eclipse-based test tooling for MQTT which Eurotech will be donating to the Paho project in the coming months; and an initial offer of the existing third-party Lua client to the Paho project. It’s exciting to see this kind of momentum behind this industry initiative, and the opening up of the MQTT client code.

Oh, and what does the word “paho” actually mean? Simple. It’s the Maori word for “broadcast”. So, tell everyone!

As part of the same project, there’s now a public test “sandbox” of the mosquitto broker at m2m.eclipse.org – again, more information has been posted in the paho-dev mailing list.

In other “cloud” news, our friends over at Pachube are now beta-testing MQTT support. This is very cool. Pachube is a neat cloud service which lets you store and chart data in a variety of ways. Roger Light has posted a nice quickstart guide to MQTT and Pachube.

On the client side of things, Nick O’Leary has updated his very popular Arduino client. A new pure Python implementation has started over on Github, too.

As always, feel free to join us on IRC or on the protocol/community mailing list, update the wiki with your examples, or talk to us on Twitter to let us know what you think!

Wiki

The mqtt.org wiki has had a thorough facelift – upgraded, new capabilities added, a mobile web UI, and a lot more information added. Over time, the static Documentation and FAQ pages will probably migrate there as well. We now have a section dedicated to the protocol itself including some of the clarifications and questions around the spec that have come up via the mailing list; a much more extensive page listing example uses; some ideas for people wanting to develop new “things”; and the coding examples section is being worked on (did you know there’s an iPhone example now?). Wikis work best with lots of contributors, so please help to build it up into a better resource – even if only to add some headings for new sections that you’d like to see created!

New implementations

The Software page continues to grow. That’s very awesome, as it means that more people get to try out MQTT in their languages of choice. There are device implementations for the Netduino and Nanode now, the node.js implementation has been significantly improved, there are some more Java implementations, and there’s also now a “plugins” section that lists extensions which add MQTT support to other runtimes.

Excitingly, there are also a couple of new broker implementations due soon – ELWIX (an embedded UNIX variant) is due to support MQTT in the next release, and Nirvana have announced early access to MQTT support in v7 of their messaging product.

Podcasts

A couple of podcasts featuring MQTT content came out during January:

• episode 9 of the IBM Connectivity and Integration podcast series features Andy Piper talking to Angel Diaz of IBM, and Arlen Nipper of Eurotech (Arlen was co-inventor of MQTT)
• there is an episode of the Technometria podcast dedicated to MQTT, with Andy Piper answering some deeper technical questions about the protocol.

Events (and Awards)

A quick round-up of recent and forthcoming events:

• IBM announced a (funded) residency to write a Redbook on MQTT during March.
• The first face-to-face meeting of the Eclipse M2M Industry Working Group took place in Hursley, UK, on January 31 2012. The Eclipse Paho roadmap was discussed (more on this to come).
• EclipseCon takes place in Reston, Virginia, March 26-29 and will feature M2M/IoT content and birds-of-a-feather sessions.
• MQTT on an Amazon Kindle (!) won the Innovation Award at the London Green Hackathon, January 28-29 – check it out!

Goodies!

If you’ve ever wanted a cool MQTT Inside sticker for your project, Ben Hardill has come up with a neat tool that uses the MOO API to enable you to self-serve purchase stickerbooks filled with them. That’s over on the new Goodies page, and the plan is to add more handy promotional schwag over there in time. What kinds of things should we make available? Let us know!

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!