I am wondering what is suitable for my case, using espeasy or Tasmota. I know espeasy is using http requests and Tasmota is using mqtt.
I want to control my sonoff devices by a raspberry pi that is acting as a home automation hub, and it in turn send updates and receives commands from AWSIoT platform. For interacting with AWSIoT platform, it uses mqtt.
What are the pros and cons of using either? and will it cause problems if I control several sonoff devices with http, while using mqtt for AWSIoT? or better use mqtt for all AWSIoT and sonoff?
I am not an expert on the topic but have tried a few things and got some insight for you on why to prefer MQTT over HTTP.
Security. Remember that the 'S' in IOT stands for security. Joking aside. I have not seen an option for encryption (HTTPS) of the HTTP-traffic for tasmota. (May the internet correct me if I am wrong) So choosing HTTP means your user/password (which are not a requirement but should totally be used) are transfered via URL query parameters as plain text. MQTT has built-in mechanisms for encrypting the traffic. I haven't been able to get that working in my network but I'm trying.
Flexibility/Reliability. With MQTT/Tasmota you have the ability to implement automations that do not rely on your home automation hub by having your devices publish MQTT-messages directly to each other for interaction. For example if you would like to implement an emergency off button that turns multiple devices off you do not want that to rely on your home automation server. Doing this with HTTP 'could' be done too but requires all users/passwords of all the devices to reside not only in your home automation hub but also on other single devices.
Networking. Adding new devices to your hub should be as easy as possible. In matters of HTTP your home automation hub has to know how to find your devices via IP-addresses or domain names since it has to resolve a URL. When using MQTT you just connect your tasmota devices to your broker and use their topic in the home automation hub. The devices do not even need to have a static IP or reachable domain name of mDNS name of any sort. That's in an essence what makes pub/sub for IOT so interesting in the first place.
Existing support. Before building your own home automation solution be sure to check out home assistant (my favorite) or any of the other home automation solutions if they fit your need. Do not reinvent the wheel. A tipp for home assistant: Do not use MQTT auto discovery in combination with tasmota. This is the only thing that has not worked out for me. Manually registering devices works reliably.
Hope that helps. If you still prefer HTTP checkout the app "Tasmota control".
I want to implement a cross platform chat app. I want to use XMPP and I know that XMPP's BOSH extension is used for instant messaging.
However, I also need a video conference and audio conference abilities. jitsi does that actually. It uses prosody for instant messaging which actually uses BOSH. And jitsi uses jitsi-videobridge(which can be found in the same link I attached previously) for audio and video conference capabilities.
Here comes my question. Can an http client using XMPP protocol can talk to a jitsi videobridge server directly without needing any other requirements. I'm confused because in the official website of jitsi, it is written that it is compatible with WEBRTC. I really couldn't grasp the idea of WEBRTC. Does WEBRTC compatible mean that http client can talk to server without any other needs or XMPP protocol is the same basis for both?
Any help or corrections appriciated.
Telegram is a cloud based chat service. All of their clients are open source. I was wondering if there's a way to host a 'private' telegram service on my own server.
If not, is there anything out there that can provide all or almost all features that telegram provides?
According to the official telegram FAQ the current answer is no:
Q: Can I run Telegram using my own server?
Our architecture does not support federation yet. Telegram is a unified cloud service, so creating forks where two users might end up on two different Telegram clouds is unacceptable. To enable you to run your own Telegram server while retaining both speed and security is a task in itself. At the moment, we are undecided on whether or not Telegram should go in this direction.
So as long as the server itself is not open-source the entire Telegram eco-system cannot be considered open-source, even though there is an open API and official open-source clients.
There seem to be some unofficial telegram servers, but it's not clear how compatible they are with existing clients.
Some possible telegram alternatives
Matrix is allegedly providing "an open network for secure, decentralized communication" and has both open-source clients (Element being the 'official' one) and an open-source server that can be self-hosted. BUT while it looks good on the surface, there are indications that companies behind it have undisclosed intimate links with governmental actors (similar to Signal).
XMPP/Jabber has been around for a longer time, is an open protocol with multiple server and client implementations, and might be the least tainted by third-party interests. XMPP was the underlying protocol behind the original Google Talk messenger before it was rebranded to Google Hangouts and switched to a proprietary protocol.
Teamspeak a collaborative platform for teams, intended originally for gamers, free client and server.
Mumble a voice oriented solution which allows self-hosted servers.
You could implement a full working Telegram-API, then have hosted clients on your server via this API.
Your users would login on your web, then you sign them in via the hosted clients on your servers.
You are basically performing a proxy service to these users , and you can even integrate other value added features for you users this way.
we are trying to develop an application(iOs, Android) using IBM worklight.
There is a requirement that the application has a feature to chat with other members.
can we directly make use of worklight push services to develop this chat app?
while searching I came across XMPP protocal and XMPP server and client concept to achieve this in android and ios apps. can we configure worklight server to make use of XMPP server and developed apps as Xmpp client?
Don't know weather I am hitting the right point in asking this question?
If any one of you have knowledge on usage of these technologies please point me to right resources.
Worklight uses the HTTP protocol for the app to communicate to the Worklight server. To use XMPP, you will have to implement it yourself.
Push notifications are a different story altogether. You can use Worklight to send push notifications to notify users when a chat message is available but this has no relation to the XMPP protocol.
Push notifications maybe be used when the application is not in foreground so that you want to get the attention of the user and tell him that you've got a new message.
If you want to implement chat this is another history and worklight has nothing to do with it. you can integrate with third party chat servers (that implement XMPP). Please see my answer on this question Implementing chat application with Java EE
is there a way for a server to push some data to a client, wirelessly and seamlessly, which may be Windows(Phone), iPhone, Mac, or Android device, without any OS integration?
If so, what's the best design pattern to do this, and what are the best technologies to go about this?
Push technology is simply a methodology of the server initiating the transfer of data, rather than the client asking the server for it.
Apple makes push technology relatively easy to use by providing such functionality built-in on the OS. As well as Android through the Google Cloud Messaging for Android. Windows, however, does not.
Apple push notifications and Google's messaging for Android is seemingly magical and/or functionality that the OS needs to handle; however, this isn't necessarily the case. The advantage of having it "integrated" in the OS, is the same as having a framework handle the functionality for you.
Speaking in technical terms, push technology is a long-lived connection from the client to the server that accepts messages. These messages would be considered pushed messages, since the client did not make an individual request for them.
The main thing to keep in mind when implementing push technology yourself, is that the client is in charge of keeping that long-lived connection alive as much as possible. Because client IP addresses can change between disconnects, servers are not guaranteed that a client's address will be persistent across disconnects. Moreover, clients can be connected from behind a firewall, making it impossible for a server to reach the client.
For comparison, pull technology is the more traditional process of a client connecting to a server and requesting data.
Your best bet for Apple iOS will be using their push notification service.
For Android devices you should use the Google Cloud Messaging for Android. Alternatively, you can create your own background service to handle the messaging; here's a guide.
For Windows (desktop at least), you will have to create your own service to perform such duty. Here's an MSDN guide explaining how to create a Windows Service using Visual Studio (VB and C#). There might be frameworks already built that handle such messaging on Windows, however, I don't know of any.
Use WebSocket (with or without socket.io).
In the future, you could use WebRTC.
With Websockets, the setup is really simple. The client (a user agent, like a browser or a WebView) connects to the Websocket server, over http(s) (less problems with firewalls) and that's it. There's a bidirectional socket with an event-based API.
If by "OS integration" you mean "write special code for each platform" then the answer is no.
As you mentioned, you would like file system access, and background processing. That combination is not available in a cross-platform way at this moment.
If by "OS integration" you meant "without having to wait for apple/google/ms to provide the ability" then the answer is yes/maybe.
All the popular platforms have Push notifications and background processing support, as long as you code it the way each particular platform expects it.
But file system access will be limited to what restrictions the platform places on you. For instance in ios and win8(phone) there is no wy to write or read a file outside of your own apps private file structure. For security reasons, you cannot access the file system of other apps.
UPDATE:
The general pattern here is to release an app for every platform you want to support.
The app will register itself with its respective platform's push notification service.
You will write generic server side code to accept the data you want to push to all your client devices. Then you will invoke the respective push API's for each platform you support, causing the client devices to wake up and trigger the app that you provided to respond.
When the app opens, you get the app to contact your server and download the full data "the push notification being just the wakeup call for your app"
This way you can easily tell how which of your devices have received the data.
Each platform specific app must save the data to its own local storage and provide a way for the data to be shared via the methods supported by its respective platform.
On IOS it can be as simple as supporting the "Open In.." paradigm.
On W8Phone, you'll have to publish the data via one of the available "sharing contracts"
And so forth for every platform you want to support.
This is the general pattern at the moment. There are some caveats. On IOS, the app will nt automatically start when a push notification is received. This means your app will only download the whole of the data when the app is opened by the user.
A mobile app also cannot generally run indefinitely in the background. This means that once the app is started, you have a limited window for push notifications to be automatically processed by your app. After the allowed "background time". The app will close and any push notifications beep on the device, but wont open the app until the user taps on one of the notifications or opens the app directly.
Technically you could use XMPP Libraries, it is meant for implementing chat system (msn, gtalk, facebook chat, etc...) but this could work well as a push message system because it is opensource and well built to handle all the cases you never thought of. Also you could host your own server and send push message that way...
Why not use a webservice? In my previous project I used webservice to deliver data from mysql database. The webservice I used was nusoap. On the client side I used kSoap library for Android. Hope this helps.
if you want to receive and send real time communication between a server and client (irrespective of the device or OS), i would highly recommend you use XMPP technology because it is designed for the sort of things you're asking for.
The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an application profile of the Extensible Markup Language [XML] that enables the near-real-time exchange of structured yet extensible data between any two or more network entities. The core features of XMPP defined in [XMPP‑CORE] provide the building blocks for many types of near-real-time applications, which can be layered on top of the core by sending application-specific data qualified by particular XML namespaces.
http://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc6121.html#intro - that is the latest RFC which will give you a good starting point.