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!

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.