Open-source middleware vender WSO2 announced new capabilities in its platform for managing Internet of Things (IoT) applications and processing IoT data. The enhancements include support of MQTT (a lightweight M2M/IoT publish/subscribe connectivity protocol), the Activiti business process management (BPM) platform, and the Open Data OData 4.0 protocol.
The WSO2 IoT platform's roots include the Apache Synapse Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 4.9) and the Apache Orchestration Director Engine (WSO2 Business Process Server 3.5). The platform is fully open source, licensed under Apache License 2.0. The platform is designed for operation within a data center or in the cloud.
WSO2 founder and CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana considers the new innovations to represent an extension of the company's "commitment to delivering open, industry standard technologies that address enterprises' IoT solution demands."
The addition of MQTT support in WSO2 Message Broker 3.0 extends the platform's messaging capabilities to include a protocol that is now an OASIS Standard. This enables remote IoT devices and applications that utilize the MQTT standard to utilize WSO2 Message Broker both for processing measured information and receiving commands that describe new data collection requirements. Since WSO2 Message Broker features the ability to automatically scale up to additional servers as message demand increases, integrating devices that communicate using MQTT with a WSO2 Message Broker cluster provides an automated means for processing sudden surges in incoming IoT data.
The integration of Activiti into WSO2 Business Process Server 3.5 adds support for BPMN 2.0, the current Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) XML specification. The objective of BPMN is to "provide businesses with the capability of understanding their business procedures in a graphical notation ... and communicate these procedures in a standard manner." WSO2 Business Process Server 3.5 utilizes these capabilities to provide a customizable web application for viewing and managing BPMN processes and tasks, publishing runtime statistics, and generating reports.
The implementation of open standard OData 4.0 protocol into WSO2 Data Services Server 3.5 enables the use of RESTful APIs to query data from a wide range of data sources, including relational databases, NoSQL databases, file systems, content management systems, and web sites.
The processing is configured and orchestrated by the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus. Version 4.9 adds support for new transport protocols that are pertinent for IoT devices and applications, including MQTT, HTTP, HTTPS, file, Java Messaging Service (JMS), Health Level 7 (HL7), Kafka, Apache CXF Reliable Messaging, and RabbitMQ.
