The Mozilla Foundation has launched WebThings, an open IoT platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web.
It describes WebThings as “a collection of re-usable software components to help you build your own web things, which directly expose the Web Thing API.”
This means they can be discovered by a Web of Things gateway or client, which can then automatically detect the device’s capabilities and monitor and control it over the web.
It is Mozilla’s open source implementation of the Web of Things, including the WebThings Gateway and the WebThings Framework.
The Web of Things was established in 2007 and is a community of developers, researchers, and designers that aims to build IoT in an open, flexible, and scalable way, using the Web as its application layer.
The Web of Things is currently undergoing standardisation at the W3C, where Mozilla is a member of the Web of Things Interest Group. Mozilla’s proposal is described by the Web Thing API specification.
The WebThings Gateway is a software distribution for smart home gateways that allows users to monitor and control their smart home over the web, without a middleman.
It is available for Raspberry Pi, Linux and Docker and provides a web-based user interface to monitor and control smart home devices, a rules engine to automate them and an add-ons system to extend the gateway with support for a wide range of existing smart home devices.
In June UK company OKdo released a Raspberry Pi based kit built around Mozilla’s WebThings Gateway.
The WebThings Framework is a collection of re-usable software components to help developers build their own web things which directly expose the Web Thing API.
It provides a web-based user interface to monitor and control smart home devices, a rules engine to automate them and an add-ons system to extend the gateway with support for a wide range of existing smart home devices.
