The IoT tool for managing digital twins reduces the services, changes the indexing method for searching and introduces a UI for managing.
Eclipse Ditto has reached its third major release. Version 3.0 of the tool for managing digital twins brings some changes that are intended to save resources and speed up the search. There are also adjustments for the connection to the W3C standard Web of Things (WoT).
Less service burden
So far, Ditto has offered six core services that are used for different tasks such as persisting units or devices (things), managing policies or as a gateway to HTTP and the WebSocket API.
In the current release, the concierge service that took care of the authorization of commands and responses is no longer available. It’s now propagated across the other services, making the Ditto installation use less CPU and memory resources and reducing network traffic.
New search index
The index for searching for things is now based on the wildcard index that MongoDB has offered since version 4.2. Compared to the previous index, which relied on the attribute pattern, it should speed up both search queries and updates and also improve stability.
There are a few name changes associated with the move. Among other things, the service and the cluster role have recently been named search instead of things-search. After rolling out Ditto 3.0, the search service will start automatically with fresh indexing in the background.
Web of Things
Since version 2.4 released in April, Eclipse Ditto has integrated the W3C standard Web of Things (WoT), which represents a uniform layer for applications in the Internet of Things. Version 1.0 of the standard was released in April 2020. Work on WoT 1.1 is currently in the final sprint.
In addition, Eclipse Ditto 3.0 brings some additions to the integration and activates the WoT integration by default. The team also recommends using Web of Things as the default type system for Ditto.
The Explorer UI for Eclipse Ditto has also been released for version 3, with which the Ditto installation can be managed via a web UI in order to manage things, policies and connections.
Ditto: digital twin management platform
Eclipse Ditto was released in version 1.0 in 2019. The name, which should be Dito in German, is chosen appropriately: Eclipse Ditto manages digital twins, i.e. a representation of physical devices and virtual objects in digital form. In the Internet of Things, they primarily help with the management of end devices and enable, among other things, access to sensors that are not permanently accessible via the network.
(Image: Eclipse Foundation)
A synchronization takes place separately from the administration. In this way, parameters can be defined or values ​​read out, regardless of the availability of the physical end devices. Eclipse Ditto offers various interfaces for connecting other software such as Apache Kafka. The software is designed for use in the cloud and requires a container runtime such as Kubernetes and relies on MongoDB as the database.
Further innovations can be found in the announcement of Eclipse Ditto 3.0.0.
