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Xojo and MQTT
Learn about MQTT, a popular messaging transport protocol, and how you can use it in your Xojo-based apps.
Issue: 22.5 (September/October 2024)
Author: Tim Dietrich
Author Bio: Tim uses Xojo to develop custom software for businesses that are running on NetSuite.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 16,722
Starting Page Number: 12
Article Number: 22502
Resource File(s):
project22502.zip Updated: 2024-09-02 10:59:00
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
One of the things that I like most about working in the NetSuite space is that there's such a wide range of businesses that use it. As a result, I've had opportunities to work on projects for many different types of businesses, including wholesale distributors, retail companies, service providers, and more.
A few years ago, I started working on projects for clients that engage in various types of manufacturing. A term that came up quite often, and that I wasn't familiar with, was "MQTT." In this article, I'll explain what MQTT is, why Xojo developers might be interested in it, and provide you with some sample MQTT-related Xojo code.
What is MQTT?
MQTT is a messaging transport protocol that systems, equipment, and devices use to communicate with each other (see Figure 1). You'll often find it used in manufacturing and industrial settings, especially in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios.
MQTT has actually been around for quite a long time. It was originally developed in 1999 as a proprietary protocol owned by IBM, and it was used to monitor oil pipelines via satellites. In 2010, IBM open-sourced the protocol and made it available royalty-free.
MQTT is specifically designed to be lightweight, and it uses an interesting publish/subscribe communication model (which I'll discuss later). These attributes make MQTT ideal in situations where devices are constrained in some way. For example, by being lightweight, MQTT can be helpful when a device (such as a remote sensor) has limited power available to it. Similarly, MQTT's publish/subscribe model can be beneficial when a device's network connectivity has limited bandwidth or is often unreliable.
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