Chapter 2. Hello, World Wide Web of Things
This chapter covers
- A sneak peek at the different levels of the Web of Things architecture
- Accessing devices with HTTP, URLs, WebSockets, and browsers
- Working with REST APIs to consume JSON data
- Learning about the notion of web semantics
- Creating your first physical mashup
Before we dive head first into the Web of Things architecture and show how to implement it from scratch, we want to give you a taste of what the Web of Things looks like. This chapter is structured as a set of exercises where you’ll build tiny web applications that use data generated by a real device. Each exercise will be a smooth introduction to the many problems and technical issues that you’ll face when building web-connected devices and applications that interact with them.
In this chapter, you’ll have the opportunity to get your hands dirty and code some simple (and less simple) Web of Things applications. Oh, you don’t have a device yet? No problem; just use ours! To make it possible for you to do those exercises without having to buy a real device, we connected our own device to the web so you can access it from your computer over the Web. Of course, if you already have a device, you can also download the source code used in this chapter and run it on your own device. How to run the code on the device will be detailed later, in chapter 7.