Eurotech Eclipse Project to Share Open Standard Application Framework for M2M Service Gateways

COLUMBIA, Md. - July 24, 2013 - PRLog -- Eurotech (http://www.eurotech.com/), a leading supplier of embedded technologies, products and systems, today announces the Eclipse Kura Project proposal in the Eclipse M2M community.  Kura is a Java and OSGi based application framework for M2M service gateways.  Through the Kura Project, Eurotech will provide a set of common services for Java developers building M2M applications, including I/O access, data services, network configuration and remote management.

“The M2M Working Group has made quick headway with several projects, and Eurotech is pleased to add to this productive group by posting the Kura Project scope,” said Marco Carrer, Vice President Software Engineering, Eurotech.  “We continue to collaborate and invest in making M2M projects easier for organizations to deploy, and sharing our expertise in the Eclipse open standards community is part of our strategy.  The Kura Project will take our years of experience developing the Everyware Software Framework and make it available to anyone through the Eclipse Foundation.”

The technology proposed in the Kura Project is currently found in Eurotech’s Everyware Cloud 3.0 platform, which can connect sensors, devices or assets quickly to analyze data in real-time for reliable, device-independent M2M applications.  

Until recently, most M2M projects were built around custom hardware, custom software and custom network connectivity.  The emergence of the service gateway model, which operates on the edge of the M2M deployment as an aggregator and controller, has opened up new, cost-effective possibilities.  Advanced software frameworks complement the service gateway and isolate the developer from the complexity of the hardware and networking subsystems.

The goals of the Eclipse Kura project include:

1.  - Provide an OSGi-based container for M2M applications running in service gateways including extensions such as I/O access, data services, watchdog, network configuration and remote management.

2.  - Adopt javax.* API for functionalities when available - for example javax.comm, javax.usb, and javax.bluetooth.

3.  - Design a build environment that isolates the native code components and makes it simple to add ports for new platforms in the Kura build and distribution.

4.  - Provide a development environment that allows developers to run M2M applications in an emulated environment within the Eclipse IDE, then deploy them on a target gateway and finally remotely provision the applications to Kura-enabled devices in the field.

Kura offers a foundation on top of which other contributions for higher-level M2M protocol implementations like ModBUS, CanBUS, ProfiBUS can reside.  Eurotech aims for the Kura Project to become another component of the interesting set of technologies grouped under the Eclipse M2M Industry Working Group umbrella.  Kura already has a strong relationship with other Eclipse projects with Eclipse Paho as the default message protocol library and Eclipse Equinox as the default OSGi container.