On the Internet of Things

The recent IETF in Anaheim had a great kickoff of the new Constrained RESTful Environment working group. Applying the REST architecture to extend the Web to even the most constrained nodes and networks (and making that scale to a trillion nodes) is an exciting and challenging task. We have started some interesting protocol design on the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP, pronounced “co-app”) – and it is nice to see this new transfer protocol taking shape!

Before diving into the protocol details of CoAP, I think it is important for people to explore what applying REST to constrained, autonomous embedded devices over really difficult networks really means. Lisa Dusseault, the previous IETF Apps Area Director who helped us get CoRE going, has started a brilliant series of blog entires about REST and the constrained world – keep an eye there!

- Lisa on why HTTP won’t do it
- Lisa on REST in protocols today

Recently I wrote an IEEE Communication Magazine article on Embedded Web Services, and we are working on a White Paper on the subject for the IPSO Alliance. In the mean time I’ll also be writing some blog entries on what REST means for this world.