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Comment by eggpy | Hacker News Reader

Can't this already be accomplished via XMPP? The protocol already exists, you just need to register devices to services. I know people don't love xmpp, but it seems like this is already an open source gateway that can manage IOT. Why do we need to create a "new open standard"?

[0] https://xmpp.org/uses/internet-of-things.html

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People don't love XMPP for a lot of reasons. Some of those reasons apply to IoT. Some reasons, like having to maintain state, are IoT specific.

Besides that, bandwidth and code complexity is a very real concern. MQTT, a lightweight message passing protocol, has become the de facto default.

So true. We switched to MQTT (abandoning websockets and other protocols) to save (a lot of) network bandwidth.

Do you mean you were using MQTT over websockets before, and you've since moved to pure MQTT (still over TCP), without websockets in between? Are you sure websockets were the cause of your network bandwidth issues?

I'm on a different team, AFAIK we where using simple JSON payloads on websocket connections. Dropping websockets and switching to MQTT saved a lot of bandwidth. I can ask for precise numbers or details if you wish.

I'm interested.

Please expand

Running XMPP on an ESP8266 or similar is probably not a great experience. MQTT is a more adequate protocol if you want to save processing time and memory (and hence energy).

It’s a really complicated standard with all kinds of components, optional components, prorietary extensions, etc. Plus it has a lot of overhead in every packet.

I don’t know how many vendors use this IoT flavor of XMPP but my guess would be not many. Implementing it on a micro controller would not be fun.

Is there XMPP XEP for controlling devices? The "things" section of that site is empty. Need standardized messages for controlling devices. That is what HTTP Web Things API provides. The Web Things API could probably be adapted to XMPP. But HTTP has taken over the world.

I would recommend XEP-0050: Ad-Hoc Commands [1] for this.

1: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0050.html

One example is shown in this 2017 FOSDEM talk: https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/xmpp_iot/

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