QEST

Hello geeks!

What you are seeing here is a prototype of a distributed MQTT broker which is accessible through REST. That's a lot of jargon, so let me show you the whole picture!

Here we are dreaming a Web of Things, where you can reach (and interact) with each of your "real" devices using the web, as it's the Way everybody interacts with a computer these days. However it's somewhat hard to build these kind of apps, so researchers have written custom protocols for communicating with the devices. The state-of-the-art seems to be MQTT, which is standard, free of royalties, and widespread: there are libraries for all the major platforms.

QEST is a stargate between the universe of devices which speak MQTT, and the universe of apps which speak HTTP. In this way you don't have to deal any custom protocol, you just GET and PUT the topic URI, like these:

$ curl -X PUT -d '{ "hello": 555 }' \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
http://mqtt.matteocollina.com/topics/prova
$ curl http://mqtt.matteocollina.com/topics/prova
{ "hello": 555 }

Let's build cool things with MQTT, REST and Arduino!

Usage

Install Node.js version 0.8, and Redis.

$ git clone git@github.com:mcollina/qest.git
$ cd qest
$ npm install
$ ./qest.js

Examples

NetworkButton

Contribute

Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet
Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it
Fork the project
Start a feature/bugfix branch
Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution
Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Please try not to mess with the Cakefile and package.json. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

Thanks

This work would not have been possible without the support of the University of Bologna, which funded my Ph.D. program. Moreover I would like to thank my professors, Giovanni Emanuele Corazza and Alessandro Vanelli-Coralli for the support and the feedbacks.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.