The Internet of Things is upon us, or at least so the technology pundits tell us. But this first phase of the Internet of Things, where we are wowed by simply controlling previously unconnected devices with a mobile app, will be short lived. Ultimately it is bound to disappoint us since these systems are too centralized, hierarchical, and incompatible.

One major obstacle to building the Internet of Things we want is our style of programming. We build systems that are based on a Web 2.0-style architecture where your interactions with your devices are conceived of as services provided to you by some vendor.

The current style of programming the Internet of Things creates silos. These silos not only fragment the data belonging to a person, but also ensure that interactions between a device and the other things a person owns or uses must be mediated by relationships between the vendors.

The past several lessons have included concepts and techniques that let us conceive of a programming style that supports systems that are more decentralized, loosely coupled, and flexible. This lesson introduces a programming model that pulls those concepts together and provides a concrete foundation for peer-to-peer architectures.

Lesson Objectives

After completing this lesson, you should be able to

Describe why and how the Internet of Things will change programming and distributed systems
Understand reactive programming and it’s goals
Explain and use the actor model as embodied in persistent compute objects
Understand and use event expressions to describe event scenarios
Describe and use common event processing and reactive programming patterns

Required Reading/Viewing

Additional Resources