The Eclipse Foundation today announced its Internet of Things (IoT) projects, making them available online. The projects range from development helpers to server-side frameworks for dealing with the numerous different standards and proprietary protocols that exist in the IoT.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that “We’ve led quite a few projects in the area. One of the things that’s interesting about it is that despite Eclipse’s historical work in tools, none of this is happening in tools; it’s all protocols. At JavaOne, we are announcing an open IoT platform for Java, using 100% open-source code.”

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The Eclipse IoT umbrella includes six major projects. First is Project Kura, which gives developers an OSGi-based gateway for devices. Milinkovich said that Kura is a “Java framework specifically for building IoT gateways. It provides a set of OSGi services for device management and application management, cloud connectivity, and a communications manager. It has a very nice Web user interface so you can manage your device gateway remotely through a browser.”

Next is Project SmartHome, which seeks to ease the tensions in a very crowded home automation space. “The home automation space is one big pile of vendor lock-in. Once you buy a hub for your home—be it Nest or Insteon—you’re going to be locked into a particular vendor in that space,” said Milinkovich.

“What Eclipse SmartHome lets you do is mix and match different devices from different vendors. We have extension points for over 30 different home automation protocols. We also have a new visual programming environment.” He added the Deutsche Telecom will be using SmartHome as the basis of its home automation platforms.

Project Californium is the Java implementation of the Constrained Application Protocol, or CoAP. CoAP is designed for very small devices, like switches and sensors, allowing them to access the Internet with little power or processing. Project Paho, on the other hand, is a Java implementation of the MQTT protocol, the lightweight publishing and messaging protocol for IoT devices.

Finally, Project OM2M is an open-source implementation of the ETSI M2M protocol, while the Eclipse SCADA project allows IoT devices to be used in a SCADA system, thus bringing the Eclipse IoT stack to assembly lines and factory floors.