WebIoT: A web application framework for the internet of things

Abstract

After the burst of the dot-com bubble in the Fall of 2001, the Internet has become a participative medium, which allows users to interact with one another and with the services from anywhere and at any time. The potential of such a change is still to be fully exploited, and phenomena such as social networks and cloud computing are just two of the many innovative solutions that have been born from the Web 2.0. At the same time, a new class of users is establishing itself in the Internet landscape: in fact, with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart objects are becoming the new, and possibly the biggest, Internet community. In this paper, we propose WebIoT, a novel web application framework, based on Google Web Toolkit, aimed at enhancing the interaction among things and between humans and things. Our framework leverages on the following principles: thing-centric design, modularity and web service communications. We will describe the main components of the framework, their interactions and how simple it is to develop any custom IoT application integrating any number and type of smart things. In particular, we will show how different things can be integrated in the framework, how they interact and how users can exploit these interactions to develop any complex functionality. Finally, we describe a typical HealthCare application for the IoT realized using WebIoT.