Push is the new Pull
Push based data may be getting traction for small sensors, appliances, and other devices. IBM celebrates 10 years of their MQTT protocol’s birth and launched the site http://asmarterplanet.com/ to promote the adoption of sensor networks that comprise “The Internet of Things“.
As the BBC explained recently, MQTT (which stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is “a platform-agnostic system which can connect almost any networked object to the wider world.” MQTT is used as a messaging protocol for sensor and actuator solutions – for example in the house that twitters, which we covered earlier this week.
The topic of MQTT came up in my conversation with Andy Stanford-Clark this week, when I asked him for his thoughts on Pachube – an open source Internet of Things platform that we have featured a couple of times on ReadWriteWeb.
Stanford-Clark told me that Pachube is “very cool, as far as it goes.” But he said that it hasn’t got “true push.” To get your data out of Pachube, Stanford-Clark explained, you have to poll it (i.e. it’s a pull system, rather than push). So in order to get real-time data, you’d need to be constantly polling Pachube. A better way to do it, according to Stanford-Clark, is have data pushed to you. This is what MQTT enables.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mqtt_poised_for_big_growth.php