Java Magazine, Sept/Oct 2016

ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 2016 32 internet of things The growing area of the Internet of Things IoT is an endto end discipline involving the integration of remote devices sensors controllers actuators and so on with server side analytics monitoring database storage and enterprise integration Reliable distributed communication is also a must Because of the many platforms devices and discrete activities that must be bound together the multiplatform nature of Java makes it an ideal language to work in Whats frequently needed however is a platform or framework to help organize all of the related business and technical activities that go into an IoT application This is where the cloud can help With respect to the cloud there are three important points to remember The cloud is more than someone elses data center Look past infrastructure and toward platform as a service PaaS where youre insulated from details such as servers load balancers clusters database sizes and configuration Instead focus on solving problems and writing code PaaS services offer ways to implement analytics that dont replace the fun of Java coding but instead reduce tedious tasks The cloud puts the power of customer and business driven changes in the hands of business owners This reduces the need for developers to make minor changes and tweaks For instance by offloading key analytics from within Java to the cloud you leave the task of tuning threshold values monitoring details and dealing with other tunable parameters to business owners who know the problem domain and are in touch with users In this article I explore this approach with an example using Oracle Internet of Things Cloud Service hereafter called Oracle IoT Cloud Service or IoTCS Using Java and Oracle IoT Cloud Service Being a PaaS service Oracle IoT Cloud Service enables you to focus on building solutions instead of worrying about servers software updates manual deployment load balancing and other infrastructure issues Rather than offering just plain vanilla PaaS services providers increasingly offer specialized implementations and frameworks in the cloud such as Oracle IoT Cloud Service to make it easier for you to build applications with less efort management and code For IoT analytics this often means being able to modify thresholds add new alerts based on new conditions and remove old alerts Oracle IoT Cloud Service makes these tasks simple with its built in Streams Explorer analytics rules To see this in action Ill examine what it takes to build a cloud application using these services Looking at the IoTCS documentation youll notice many REST APIs rules based analytics and integration with business intelligence mobile devices and enterprise systems based on packages and adapters It might not be apparent how Java plays a role However Oracle provides a Java based IoTCS Client Software Library that facilitates device gateway and enterprise application development in Java ERIC BRUNO Using the Cloud with IoT By pushing device control and analytics into an IoT specific cloud devices can be remotely managed and operated