In earlier sections of this chapter, there were many devices and applications that were not explained in depth. To understand their roles in an IoT solution, it's important to create one example of each.

The scenario created here will be a Device connected to the IBM Watson IoT Platform that sends a timestamp as data, as well as an Application that prints that to stdout using Node.js:

We will then improve this by adding a gateway to the solution, which looks similar to the following diagram:

At the end of the day, the difference of having a gateway connection and a device connection is that you can create an abstraction or specialization of the device connected to the IoT platform, depending on whatever is easier, cheaper, or any other reasons that might drive the decision.