Patrick Goldsack on why Configured Things is taking a fresh look at the SmartFrog Open-source Project.
The much loved Smartfrog project is still resident on SourceForge. We are in the process of moving the ancillary content (videos, introductory material, etc.) to a new server and in the mean time, we apologise for its current non-availability. We will try to restore it as soon as we possibly can.
We are in the process of redesigning SmartFrog itself to bring it up to date with the technologies that are now in current use and to make it suited to being the core modeling and configuration framework for Configuration Things.
The areas that are under change are:
- A new more powerful configuration description language, taking all the good parts of the SmartFrog notation and making them even more expressive and powerful.
- A new lighter-weight component model better suited to run on small light-weight devices common in the Internet-of-Things.
- A security model that better suits the federated nature of the problem space that Configured Things is tackling.
- A way of supporting very rapid and possibly conflicting changes to configurations, coming from the set of federated instances, with appropriate roll-back and failure recovery.
The intent is that this new version of SmartFrog (colloquially known as SF2) will be released as open source with a permissive license that will encourage wide adoption and the creation of a user ecosystem.