A New Future for the WebThings IoT Platform
By: Ben Francis
Tags: IoT, Web Of Things, Internet of Things, Open Source, Smart Buildings

After four years of incubation at Mozilla, Krellian is proud to become the new commercial sponsor of WebThings, an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web.

Today we are announcing the release of WebThings Gateway 1.0 and setting out a vision for the future of the WebThings project.

WebThings

WebThings is an open source implementation of emerging W3C Web of Things standards and consists of three main components:

WebThings Gateway — a software distribution for smart home gateways which enables users to directly monitor and control their home over the web, without a middleman

— a software distribution for smart home gateways which enables users to directly monitor and control their home over the web, without a middleman WebThings Framework — a collection of re-usable software components to help developers build their own web things which directly expose the Web Thing Protocol

— a collection of re-usable software components to help developers build their own web things which directly expose the Web Thing Protocol WebThings Cloud — a collection of cloud services for securely deploying connected devices and remotely managing them over the internet

Flying the Nest

Following a company restructuring in August, Mozilla was looking for a new home for the WebThings community to continue their work.

Having co-founded the project whilst working at Mozilla, I joined discussions with two of my former colleagues Michael Stegeman and David Bryant about spinning out WebThings as an independent open source project. We worked with Mozilla on an agreement to transition the project to a new community-run home at webthings.io, and have spent the last three months working together on that transition.

WebThings Gateway 1.0

Today marks the public release of WebThings Gateway 1.0 and the formal transition of the WebThings platform to its new home at webthings.io. Going forward, Krellian will be sponsoring the new WebThings website and replacement cloud infrastructure, to continue to provide automatic software updates and a secure remote access service for WebThings gateways around the world.

You can read more about the 1.0 release and the transition of existing gateways to the new infrastructure on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

Krellian & WebThings

Krellian’s mission is to “extend the World Wide Web into physical spaces to make our built environment smarter, safer and more sustainable.” WebThings provides an ideal open source platform, built on web standards, to help achieve that mission.

In the short term Krellian will be leveraging the WebThings Cloud remote access service as part of our new digital signage platform. In the longer term we plan to explore other enterprise use cases for the WebThings platform, to help make buildings smarter, safer and more sustainable.

These commercial applications of WebThings will help provide revenue streams to support the long term sustainability of the open source project and allow it to continue to develop and grow.

The WebThings Community

Krellian highly values the thriving community who have supported the WebThings project over the last four years. From hackers and makers to educators and hobbyists, the community have been pivotal in building, testing and promoting WebThings around the world.

Amongst their achievements is the translation of WebThings Gateway into 34 spoken languages, the creation of over a hundred gateway add-ons and the building of countless DIY projects in a dozen different programming languages. Community members have contributed their time and effort to help build and promote WebThings and support other members in using it in thousands of private smart homes around the world.

We intend to support the community to continue with their great work, and have put in place an open governance structure to distribute decision making and foster leadership amongst the global WebThings community.

Future Roadmap

The following are some ideas about where to take the platform next, but we’d also very much like to hear from the community about what they would like to see from the project going forward.

W3C Compliance

WebThings has been developed in parallel with, and has contributed to, the standardisation of the Web of Things at the W3C. Since the last release of WebThings Gateway in April, the W3C Thing Description specification has reached “recommendation” status and is now an international standard.

We’d like to work towards making WebThings compliant with this standard, as there are still a remaining number of differences between the W3C and Mozilla specifications. In order to fill in the gaps between Mozilla’s Web Thing API and the W3C’s Thing Description standard, we plan to continue to lead work on standardising the Web Thing Protocol as a concrete protocol for communicating with devices over the web.

Production Gateway OS

The main WebThings Gateway software image is currently built on top of the Raspbian Linux distribution. This served the project well for its initial target of DIY smart home users, using the popular Raspberry Pi single board computer.

As the platform matures, we would like to explore a more production-quality IoT operating system like Ubuntu Core or Balena OS on which to base the WebThings Gateway distribution.

This will have the following benefits:

A smaller footprint, reducing the minimum system requirements for running the gateway Enabling the targeting of a wider range of hardware for consumer and enterprise use cases Better security, through containerisation and automatic software updates for the underlying operating system

WebThings Controller

There was previously a project to build controller software for WebThings, to run on a controller device such as a smart speaker or smart display. The initial prototype was built on Android Things, but was discontinued when Google locked down the Android Things platform to specific OEMs and introduced restrictions on how it could be used.

Krellian would like to explore new controller software built on our open source Krellian Kiosk web runtime, which could allow for touch and voice input. This software would be designed so that it could either run on the same device as the gateway software, or on a separate controller device.

WebThings App

A native WebThings mobile app could act as a general purpose Web of Things client. This could potentially:

Help to streamline the setup process of a WebThings Gateway Act as a client for native web things which don’t need a gateway Help with the standardisation process by providing a user friendly reference implementation of a Web of Things client

WebThings Cloud

Finally, we would like to explore expanding the WebThings Cloud offering. This could include an online dashboard for monitoring and controlling devices across multiple premises, and cloud to cloud integrations with other IoT platforms and voice assistants.