Open-source release of IoT app environment Calvin
ericsson.com
ericsson.com
In most cases though, your IoT devices do need to interact with a central authority (not just with each other). For example, if you have a web-based dashboard which displays the devices' state, it means that the devices will need to send that state to a central authority from time to time (in order to keep the web-based dashboard updated). Also, if you want users to interact with these devices from that dashboard, then the devices will need to receive commands from that central authority too.
What I'm getting at here is that in many cases, it's more practical to make all your IoT devices talk to each other through remote servers than directly with each other because usually there is an element of 'monitoring and coordination' which means that you need one or more remote servers to act as a central authority for the IoT network.
It may be more efficient to just make all the devices talk to each other through pub/sub hosted by a central authority than directly with each other... Unless your IoT devices are fully autonomous and that data doesn't need to be aggregated (which, to be fair, may cover some use cases).
Or maybe also this could be useful if this network of devices works in isolation - For example, the dashboard connects directly with your devices without needing to coordinate with external data from devices owned by other users.
But it seems to be written in Python... Why do all of these IoT platforms forget that most things will be running on a Cortex M3 with 32 kB of RAM?
Or am I missing what this is? Their explanation is kind of buzzwordy.
The reference Calvin implementation is written in Python and is available on Github. With time there will be leaner runtimes requiring less resources. The intention of the design is to even allow for micro controller based implementations.
It seems the idea is not to write a platform for the devices only, but a full-stack one that can run on the various parts (devices, intermediary hubs, and servers).
A research paper on Calvin was presented last week at the 6th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT 2015).
Considering how large they are, it's not that strange that they use various language for various projects.
An interesting note is that Ericsson only a month later released their very successful ATM switch AXD 301 that was written mostly in Erlang.