Open, application centric, free to try: The mission of Cumulocity is to make mobile machine-to-machine applications profitable for all businesses through ready-made, cloud subscription services.
Using REST-APIs with the JSON data format for communication, mobile data consumption and costs can grow very rapidly, especially when data is sent frequently and a large number of devices is employed. Furthermore, many devices such as the Arduino do not have the capacity to process JSON adequately which has been a major obstacle in developing the Arduino client for the Cumulocity platform.
To solve these problems, SmartREST has been introduced to act as a proxy server between the client endpoint and the Cumulocity platform, reducing the amount of data to be sent and removing the necessity to deal with JSON on the client side.
By storing device-relevant JSON data in a template, data density can be increased tenfold. The proxy then translates the compact data to the full JSON which is sent to the platform and vice-versa. On the first connect to the proxy, the client will send the template and from then on communicate using compact data.
My involvement in this project spans from the design of the proxy server architecture to the actual implementation and functional testing, but also includes the development of a C++ client reference-implementation which runs on a host of devices ranging from the Arduino to full-fledged server systems.