The internet of things (or “IoT” for short) has come to describe a number of technologies and research disciplines that enable the internet to reach out into the world of physical objects.
A visible amount a projects use XMPP for these networks of communicating objects. Here are a few of them.
WideTag’s OpenSpime relies on XMPP: OpenSpime is set of XMPP extensions and an opensource library PyOpenSpime. OpenSpime uses the standard XMPP for identity, presence, communication, request-response, and decentralized architecture. WideTag’s extensions add encryption, digital signatures, authority claiming, data reporting and seeking.
Shion, from Audacious Software, is using a vanilla XMPP as a channel for receiving and responding to commands transmitted remotely. It uses disco, Ad-Hoc commands, vCard, avatars, activity, entity time and software version (in the future location query). Shion framework is GPL.
Nabatztag is a smart object connected to the internet. That said, it can also be defined as a “communicating rabbit”, as it uses XMPP to get the weather forecast, e-mail notifications, stock market report, news headlines, alarm clock, RSS-Feeds, and much more since it is customisable.
TiVo, the set-tob box, uses XMPP in order to get in real-time TV schedule updates and new software updates notifications.
Intuity Medialab has also been able to switch on and off an office light from an Android phone with a simple GTalk client.
Through all these examples, we can see XMPP is a good candidate for a communication layer in the internet of things. All the standard features are useful, like presence, messaging, request-response, and we can also imagine a lot of use cases with Multi-User Chat and PubSub.
The internet of things might become a development area for XMPP in the near future.
