IBM is contributing code to the open source Eclipse Foundation to help enable a new era of machine-to-machine communications.
The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) has been used by IBM as a messaging protocol for a number of years. In 2010, IBM announced that MQTT would be freely available under a royalty-free license. Today IBM has expanded the openness by contributing an open source MQTT client for Java and C to Eclipse.
“MQTT runs on top of TCP/IP, it’s a simple API that sits on top,” Andy Piper, WebSphere Messaging Community Lead at IBM told InternetNews.com. “It doesn’t have any relationship with HTTP, it doesn’t have any kind of encapsulation where it runs through a tunnel, it’s not that kind of thing, it’s purely on top of the TCP/IP networking stack.”
Piper added that MQTT provides a header that has information about quality of service, and the user can attach whatever payload they want. For simple information updates, Pipe said that MQTT is a lightweight solution.