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Comment by sudoaza | Hacker News Reader

HTTP for IOT is super heavy, on one side it may be simpler for developer to hop in, but performance wise this shouldn't be used for anything large scale or where power/bandwidth constrains are an issue.

Something like ble/lora/zigbee for device-gateway comunication and mqtt or similar for gateway-collector is the best for me.

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The great thing about HTTP outside of just being well known and available everywhere for developers is that you can use it to negotiate switches to other completely different protocols, or change content types, as necessary. This doesn't do much to help truly resource constrained environments but honestly as power and performance get cheaper, I think most consumer usecases can spare the cycles.

The machine the gateway is running on can also be extended to use your solution of choice, for example ZWave with an ESP8266[0][1].

You can also bring your ble/lora/zigbee device-gateway solution with you and have that thing talk to the WebThings Gateway as well, acting as a proxy if necessary.

IMO it doesn't get much better than this -- the ship to have one true communication standard (tm) has already sailed if it was ever even possible, so we're going to have to paper over them if we want devices to interoperate -- whatever does the papering is probably going to be more powerful than the devices themselves, and HTTP has proven to be a pretty easy to grasp and flexible enough interface over them.

All that said, in the lighter-than-http pile of technologies there's also CoAP[2] which I learned about recently that is pretty cool.

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/zwave-adapter

[1]: https://www.instructables.com/id/Mozilla-IoT-Gateway-With-ES...

[2]: http://coap.technology

I am much more concerned about "Web contagion" and the dysfunction of the "web ecosystem" prematurely turning people off IOT before it can take off.

I don't want webdevs coming and breaking the embedded ecosystem. I don't want my fridge crashing because of somebody's webpack setup going haywire.

And we all know some clown will hook up a nuclear launch system to it so the good General can connect via his home WiFi. And the doctor a hospital life support system to "stay informed" at his cabin...

For sure I applaud this and will play with it. And hope my cynicism is misplaced.

There are plenty of IoT devices that are mains powered, and also many modern microcontrollers include an HTTP stack (e.g. the eps32). But yeah I agree it does seem pretty stupid to say "It's easy! Just use http, SSL, websockets and JSON!" when your device might be sending a single bit and running off a coin cell.

the problem with ble/lora/zigbee is they all require extra hardware (radio)

But with lora you can achieve, 5 km range while running on coin size battery. Same with zwave, ble but those have lower ranges (new ble supports meshing). with Wi-Fi based devices you need also extra hardware (access points), and you need power supply for every device (or in another words you can't have "wireless" devices)

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