Blog

<p>Enterprises employ a large number of different software solutions to run their companies and have long looked to various forms of the enterprise portal to help manage the complexity of this wide array of software. As a data service exchange, <a href="http://wot.io">wot.io</a> is well aware of the challenge of pulling out the important components of multiple data services and putting them in one view. With this in mind, and as just one example, we have developed an integration with <a href="http://www.jboss.org/products/portal/overview/">JBOSS Portal</a>, the popular open source enterprise portal system, as an example of how you can manage the complexity.</p>
<p>The wot.io operating environment (OE) provides essential infrastructure to run, manage, and connect IoT applications from <a href="http://www.wot.io/partners/">our partners</a> including device management platforms (DMPs) and a wide array of data services including storage, analytics, scripting, Web API automation, real-time processing, visualization, and more. The main focus of an IoT solution lies in these essential data services, however the wot.io OE itself also requires configuration and administration. We used these administration interfaces for our first portlet integrations with JBOSS.</p>
<p>The wot.io OE administration tools are built as individual components of HTML suitable for placement in various portal frameworks as a portlet, widget, web thing, gadget, etc. These units can be composed together to provide sets to tools most useful for a given user or use case. We have portlets for user management (adding, updating removing), group management, API permissions, and more. The portlets are built with a hub in the browser, allowing them to all communicate efficiently with a given wot.io OE cluster over a single WebSocket connection.</p>
<p><img src="http://idfiles.leveelabs.com/55bd0288af0b0930ba599bd0c4b7ca38/resources/img_new/labs_wot_io/wotio_widgets.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>Using the JBOSS portal tools, the portlets can be added to and arranged with other JBOSS portlets on a single portal page.</p>
<p><img src="http://idfiles.leveelabs.com/55bd0288af0b0930ba599bd0c4b7ca38/resources/img_new/labs_wot_io/groups_widget.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>The design of the admin components as portlets make the portal design flexible and all leverage a single log-in even though they are separate components. Communication through the hub via a persistent WebSocket connection also makes the portlets "live" in the sense that they can both send new settings to the connected wot.io OE and receive updates and dynamically update status.</p>
<p>This video shows the full process for adding wot.io OE administration portlets to a JBOSS portal.</p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Q5kOHAlxH8" frameborder="0" width="420" height="315" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>As a data service exchange, the next useful extension of this pattern is to add key components from deployed data services to the portal as well. This allows a user to include status information, reports, graphs and visualization, and other important information together in a single portal view even if the information comes from several different data services. Stay tuned for more examples of this approach and other solutions for making seamless IoT solutions.</p>