Ideas for IoT MiniApp Standardization

Transcript

Hello, everyone.

This is Shen Ping from Alibaba Group.

I'm glad to attend this meeting and share some ideas about standardization of MiniApp online.

With the rapid development of IoT， more and more embedded device and sensors are connected to cloud with screen for easy interaction.

But in IoT domain the application development methods are still backward.

Most basically, most apps depend on C, C++, ASM language, which means huge cost on both learning and developing.

And also UI components are far from enough.

not to mention that when we finally complete the app.

We are likely to realize that the main usability and backward compatibility will be the new problems.

I know you guys here are all experts and maybe someone would like to tell me MiniApp can solve all these problems.

Yes, you're right.

MiniApp use high level language, friendly IDE development environment, and rich component.

But is that enough?

No, as we can see, in IoT domain, the hardware performance between devices are different.

Some device just has four to eight megabytes RAM.

What's more, we always need to do lots of actual work on sensors and on chip, peripheral source to meet our application scenarios.

Because of huge gap between IoT device and mobile phone, we suggest to extend standard of IoT MiniApp So what is IoT MiniApp?

First, it is not a new thing.

but a standard MiniApp with extended and reformed components and JSAPI.

Second, it supports both web and local render mode.

Just to make everything clear, the local render mode is a light render engine and with limited CSS style to run MiniApp on IoT device with low performance.

Third, it does not depend on native app and can run different OS platforms stand alone.

Up to now, more and more scenarios are suitable for IoT MiniApp, such as IoT control panel, intelligent watch, smart speaker, and etc.

We always believe that IoT MiniApp can connect smart device each other, sharing data, and connection of all sense.

All modification that made on IoT MiniApps are listed as follow: connectivity component, peripherals component, camera component, mode component, Bluetooth mesh, app management and also some unnecessary JSAPI， which just use on mobile phone are removed, such as addPhoneContact, and share MiniApp, etc.

And now I will put forward some standardization proposals for this component we extent.

First, connectivity component.

There are more ways communication on IoT device than mobile phone.

So we hope to encapsulate communication protocols which helps developers build up their app easily, include UDP, TCP, HTTP, MQTT, which are most widely used protocols in IoT domain.

Second, peripherals component.

There are lots of on-chip peripherals.

we will be used on IoT device, such as UART, GPIO, I2C, etc.

Due to developers' hope to control this low level peripherals to apply on some customer the scenarios.

Camera components.

Camera will be used more and more in IoT domain, such as face tracking, home monitoring, video chart, and etc.

So, camera as one of the most important part of multimedia component, it should be added to the standard of IoT MiniApp.

With this component, we will help developers to deal with camera buffer, encode and decode.

We also will provide series of control event such as take photo, start video, start record.

Even more, we may integrate some simple algorithm to have developers to develop more complicate IoT MiniApps.

Fourth, motor component.

We will exposing low-level motor control event to IoT MiniApp to make motor perform well enough.

We suggest include stepper motor, servo motor, Five, Bluetooth mesh.

Bluetooth mesh as one of most important ability in IoT device, we hope to standardize the behavior of provision, status submit, message dispatch, so that developer can build up apps with Bluetooth mesh uniformly.

The last, app management.

Due to the IoT MiniApp can run stand alone, so we need provide more JSAPI, for developers to control or manage their apps.

such as installApp JSAPI, which can always keep IoT MiniApp up to date, and this also will make launchApp faster.

We can also use startApp or startPage to switch between different types.

That's all.

Thank you for listening.

I look forward to discuss IoT MiniApp standardization with you again in foreign meeting.

Thank you again.

Bye-bye.