Dean Roddey
Senior Member
wkearney99 said:Oh there's a lot to be said for a host operating environment that allows for a lot of options. I'm tempted to say "and it's not good" yet that would be exaggerating a bit. But a lot of stuff has certainly got a lot of cruft piled onto it. What with dead-end drivers or only last gen support.
It's one thing to have a flexible framework, it's another to have lashed together spaghetti. We've all suffered through enough of that. Not pointing any fingers here, metaphorically or otherwise.
There's a lot of fresh momentum and development building behind IoT concepts and interaction with networked resources as a fundamental part of the process. Not just an endpoint orphaned at the other end of an RS-232 line (or emulated on ethernet) without any real integration within the framework. Simple things like reflection, json, REST and the like go a long way toward making for new kinds of automation. Lots of thing have always "been possible" but often failed to meet market expectations.
IMO, I think you have it completely backwards. IoT is not at all about tight integration, it's about islands of stuff, created by people who are only thinking about their own little universes, that something may or may not be able to bring together reliably, most of which is far more oriented towards control with their own standalone phone app.
A device with a serial protocol that's well designed is infinitely more about integration than most of the IoT stuff. REST is not really a good protocol for device control. It's inherently defined as a client/server (aka polling only) protocol, so adding async support requires essentially doing things that are outside the definition of the standard, so it's inherently non-standard.