WebThings

2019: Announcement

On April 18, 2019 Mozilla submitted the WebThings platform which the company open implementation of Web of Things — the standard for monitoring and control of devices of Internet of Things.

The concept of Web of Things developed by Consortium of the World Wide Web (World Wide Web Consortium) provides mechanisms for the formal description of the IoT interfaces to allow devices and IoT services to interact with each other, irrespective of their basic implementation, and according to several network protocols.

Mozilla published the open standard for control of IoT-devices

Work on WebThings began in 2017 within the Things project  (Project Things) assuming development  of technologies for creation of the decentralized network of devices, uses of URL for addressing of IoT-devices and providing the accessibility to them from the Internet.

For overcoming the fragmentation caused by variety of firmwares and protocols for Internet of Things  the WebThings platform was also submitted. She acts as a layer for unification of access to different categories of devices, hiding for herself features of each platform and not demanding use of application, specific to each producer. 

Instead of installation of the mobile application for each type of IoT-devices, it is possible to use the single unified web interface. WebThings supports such functions as determination of devices in the local area network, the choice of the web address for connection with devices from the Internet, creation of accounts for access to the web interface of the gateway, connection to the gateway of the devices supporting the proprietary ZigBee and Z-Wave protocols, remote turning on and switching off of devices from the web application. 

Mozilla WebThings consists of two principal components:

• WebThings Gateway is a program distribution kit for gateways of the systems of the smart home which is ground on security and confidentiality;

• WebThings Framework is library of the reused program components.^[1]

Notes