Red Hat AMQ Online 1.1 was recently announced, and I am excited about it because it contains a tech preview of our Internet of Things (IoT) support. AMQ Online is the “messaging as service solution” from Red Hat AMQ. Leveraging the work we did on Eclipse Hono allows us to integrate a scalable, cloud-native IoT personality into this general-purpose messaging layer. And the whole reason why you need an IoT messaging layer is so you can focus on connecting your cloud-side application with the millions of devices that you have out there.

I have been working with ESPs, for playing around in the space of IoT, for a while now. Mostly using the ESP8266 and Espressif, through platform.io. In recent times, I have also started to really like Rust as programming language. And I really believe that all Rust has to offer, would be great match for embedded development. So when I had a bit of time, I wanted to give it a try. And here is what came out of it …

Up until now I only used the ESP and Rust on a very high level. So I was hoping to get some kind of an “out-of-the-box” solution. Well, we are not there yet. But my only intention was to play around a bit with the technology. And so I started to search what others had done in this area already.

The Eclipse IoT project is a top level project at the Eclipse Foundation. It currently consists of around 40 projects, which focus on different aspects of IoT. This may either be complete solutions, like the Eclipse SmartHome project, the PLC runtime and IDE, Eclipse 4DIAC. Or it may be building block projects, like the MQTT libraries of Eclipse Paho, or the cloud scale IoT messaging infrastructure of Eclipse Hono. I can only encourage you to have a look at the list of projects and do a bit of exploring.

And while it is great to a have a diverse set of projects, covering the three tiers of IoT (Device, Gateway and Cloud), it can be a challenge to explain people, how all of those projects can create something, which is bigger than the individual projects. Because having 40 different IoT projects is great, but imagine the possibilities of having a whole IoT ecosystem of projects. Mixing and matching, building your IoT solution as you see fit.

When you want to secure a Spring Boot application with e.g. Let’s Encrypt or the OpenShift Service CA, then you will pretty soon figure out that working with PKCS #1 PEM files is a nightmare when it comes to Java. When you Google for PKCS #1 and Java, you will find all kinds of tutorials which suggest to use openssl and keytool to create a JKS or PKCS #12 keystore. As Java actually supports pluggable KeyStore implementations, I think there is a better solution for that.

In part #1 and part #2, we saw how easy it is to interface Apache Camel with Kura Wires. Simply by re-using some existing functionality. A few lines of XML, Groovy and you can already build an IoT solution based on the Camel ecosystem and the Eclipse Kura runtime. This part will focus on the Java DSL of Apache Camel.