Building the Web of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot topic! Analysts call it a disruptive technology. Competing standards and technologies pop up daily, and there are no tangible signs of a single protocol that will let all devices, services, and applications communicate seamlessly. Fortunately, there's a great universal IoT application platform available now: the World Wide Web. Web standards and tools provide the ideal substrate for connected devices and applications to exchange data. This vision is called the Web of Things. Building the Web of Things is a hands-on guide for designing and implementing scalable, flexible, and open IoT solutions using Web technologies. This book provides the right balance of theory, code samples, and practical examples, and shows how to connect all sorts of devices to the Web and expose their services and data over REST APIs. After building a simple proof of concept app, readers will learn a systematic methodology and system architecture for connecting things to the Web, finding other things, sharing data, and combining these components to rapidly build distributed applications and physical mashups. With each chapter, readers gain the knowledge and skills needed to take full advantage of a new generation of real-time, web-connected devices and services, giving them the ability to build scalable applications that merge the physical and digital worlds. Key Features Gets readers started with the Web of Things in minutes Offers a complete toolbox of Web and Internet technologies Hands-on guide for using the web to connect apps to the real world About the Technology The Web of Things is about using the latest Web technologies as the underlying application-level protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). While the Internet of Things mainly focuses on the networking side of how to connect things, the Web of Things focuses on the application layer, i.e., how things can expose and share their data and services so that they can easily be consumed by Web applications.