A Development Environment for FIWARE-based Internet of Things Applications

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) applications has to face important issues such as the inherent device heterogeneity in terms of capabilities, computing power, network protocols, and energy requirements. To address this challenge, IoT middleware platforms have been proposed to abstract away the specificities of such devices, promoting interoperability among them, and easing application development. One of these proposals is FIWARE, an open, generic platform developed in the European Community to leverage the development of Future Internet applications. Given a set of FIWARE components required for a specific application under development, their deployment and configuration can be made either manually or using a container-based approach. However, setting up an environment composed by the main FIWARE components might sometimes not be a trivial process. This paper introduces FIWARE-Lab@RNP, a Web virtual laboratory for prototyping and experimenting applications based on the FIWARE platform. The main concern of FIWARE-Lab@RNP is enabling the use of FIWARE resources through the Internet in a transparent way, thus relieving users from the need of deploying and operating a FIWARE instance on their development or owned environment. The virtual laboratory provides functionalities for easily creating, configuring, and managing instances of FIWARE components, devices, context entities, and services while attempting to minimize the learning curve regarding these tasks.