Preface

Our biggest hope with this book is that we’ve done a good job of providing you with a deep overview of what the future of the Internet of Things (IoT) might look like. Despite the oceans of e-ink used every day to talk about the IoT, we know that practical and authoritative content about this topic is still hard to come by. We hope that this book will bring some order to the chaos by proposing a pragmatic and structured methodology to building IoT devices and services, one inherited from our own experience building large-scale commercial systems for connected devices.

Because every actor wants to get a slice of the future pie, there are literally hundreds of competing standards for connected devices. The “my protocol is better than yours” attitude has been the major cause of the fragmentation of the IoT world and the reason why it’s plagued by constant wheel reinventions and a severe lack of proper innovation. All existing applications, tools, and mechanisms need to include support for every new protocol that appears. And with the hundreds of protocols already out there that need to be integrated and maintained—well, you get the idea!

When we started working on the Web of Things about a decade ago, our objective was to pause a bit and reflect on what could be done to realize the full potential of the IoT. At that time, it was clear that most projects tackled only smaller issues of the IoT. Few projects tried to look at the bigger picture of the IoT and ask, “What problems are we really trying to solve and how can we make it easier to innovate?”

Almost everyone was trying to build a global network optimized for devices and data-driven applications—from scratch! Web of Things people like us, on the other hand, decided to look into and learn from the most successful application layer of them all: the web. The web scales, it’s open and easy to take part in, and best of all, it’s versatile! If it’s good enough for banking services, games, chat rooms, and changing the media industry, why wouldn’t it be good enough for the Internet of Things?

Turns out, it is! We wrote this book to show you not only the why but also the how. We hope it will equip you with the understanding and tools necessary to thrive in a world where most physical objects have a digital life of their own thanks to web protocols. This book is about not reinventing the wheel where it isn’t needed. And, as you’ll see, it can be a lot of fun to reuse solid web protocols to build ever bigger, smarter, and simpler Things—to build the Web of Things!

DOM & VLAD