{"id":232,"date":"2019-03-13T14:02:01","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T13:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/iot-development-the-snap4city-way\/"},"modified":"2020-02-14T10:20:18","modified_gmt":"2020-02-14T09:20:18","slug":"iot-development-the-snap4city-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/ai-ml\/big-data\/iot-development-the-snap4city-way\/","title":{"rendered":"IOT Development: the Snap4City way"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the last decade, application development has extended its borders far and beyond the classical web application<\/span> paradigm. In particular, two main tendencies arose, namely Cloud Computing<\/span> and the Internet of Things<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Delivering applications on cloud frameworks is now a simple and standard task for programmers<\/span>. Production environments or even retail customers or software vendors require the capability to do it easily and efficiently. The same is becoming true for IOT applications, which pose a different level of complexity<\/span> and new challenges to developers.<\/p>\n

Indeed, by its very nature, IOT has to do with different hardware devices and communication protocols and it displays a manifold of ways to collect data<\/span>, connect to a device or even manage devices to prepare them for a connection. While in the Cloud Computing<\/span> paradigm big vendors provide APIs and frameworks which have become de facto standards, in the IOT realm there is a more fragmented picture concerning platforms, devices and standards.<\/p>\n

In particular, IOT development aimed at smart city applications is becoming an important issue. Providing a unified, integrated and complete framework is where  Snap4City<\/a> comes into play. It delivers a fully open source<\/span>, data-driven, scalable platform based on cloud, which also enables its users to analyse and aggregate huge amounts of data<\/span> by means of big data and machine learning techniques, and to offer services such as anomaly detection, early warning and environmental risk assessment.<\/p>\n

Snap4City applications should be viewed as data-driven applications, which may be customised tailoring on specific needs and shared among the community<\/span>. The basic tool to use and manage IOT applications on Snap4City is the dashboard, which is in a sense the governance layer of smart city application within Snap4City itself:
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Img 1: Interaction between Snap4City Dashboard, IOT application and the Smart City<\/span>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The dashboard provides both the front-end of the applications and the development environment in which to create them. Snap4City allows us to set up an application by combining micro-services according to a given logic flow, in a stateful manner, thanks to a GUI editor to describe graphically the logic flow and all the single services it ought to connect.<\/p>\n

The programmer<\/span> can choose from dozens of micro-services which perform a single micro-task, such as, for example:<\/p>\n