Some interesting websites about 'The Internet of Things'

My journey on 'The Internet of Things' (IoT) is still undertaken. This week, I did a lot of researches online and gathered some helpful information about this issue. Here are some interesting websites below:

1. 'Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009', Written by Richard MacManus, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_internet_of_things_products_of_2009.php

2. The events of the IoT in Europe, http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/

3. The explanation of IoT in wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things

4. 'Precyse Technologies Advances 'Internet of Things' With First Bi-Directional Wireless Asset Network Standard', http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Precyse-Technologies-Advances-Internet-Things-With-First-Bi-Directional-Wireless-Asset-1167669.htm

5. IoT in China, http://www.giotc.com/en/index.php

6. 'O'Reilly Media Emerging Technology Conference', http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail717.html

7. 'Want eternal life? It could be possible in the Internet of Things', http://www.smh.com.au/technology/blogs/untangling-the-web/want-eternal-life-it-could-be-possible-in-the-internet-of-things/20100722-10m1g.html

8. 'Cheat Sheet: The internet of things', http://www.silicon.com/technology/networks/2010/06/24/cheat-sheet-the-internet-of-things-39746022/

9.'Cisco Futurist Discusses Internet of Things, Tech Predictions, More on Talk2Cisco Broadcast', http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/cisco_futurist_discusses_internet_of_things_tech_predictions_more_on_talk2c/

10. IoT 2010 conference, http://www.iot2010.org/cfp/

11. 'What the Internet of Things is not', http://technicaltoplus.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-internet-of-things-is-not.html

12. '2010+ Technology: The Internet of Things Slowly Comes of Age…', http://cybject.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/2010-technology-forecast-the-internet-of-things-slowly-comes-of-age/

CSS: An powerful tool for web design

This week's topic is about the XHTML and CSS. Actually, I didnot like CSS before because in my opinion, it's not as convenient as HTML when I began to be familiar with HTML only. There was a doubt in my mind - why do we need to use CSS to do the design work instead of HTML? Is it neccessary?

The anawer is 'yes, it is!'. Before introducing the CSS, the web developers always wrote HTML codes to arrange the layouts and contents of websites. But they found that there ware a lot of duplicate workload when the websites became large. Thay had to wrote the same codes for many pages with the same layouts and styles. How to make things simple? The CSS!

Since the first version CSS1 was published in 1996, the CSS has been improved and maitained by W3C for a long time. Nowadays, the most common version is CSS3. It can be embedded in HTML pages in the head or body tags, or linked to another css page separately within the HTML pages. The benefits of CSS are flexibility, separation content from presentation, site-wide consistency, etc. It only focuses on presentation so that the developers can put less energy but get dramatic improvement on the appearance.

Besides, CSS is very easy to understand and learn because it is similar to our nature languages. As soon as the layouts are designed, the developers can change the pages' appearance without changing a word in the HTML codes! 

The server-side script language - PHP

PHP (Hypertext Preprocesser) originally known as "Personal Home Page" is a scripting language used to create dynamic web pages. It is with the syntax from C, Java and Perl, and a widely used coding language which could be embedded within HTML pages. But the differecne is that HTML is a clinet-side markup language, while PHP has to be executed in the server side and interpreted by the PHP engine which could be installed in the same web server like Apache or another PHP server separatedly from the web server.

PHP is used for e-commerce, blogs, web based e-mail services, content management systems and personal and business websites. The most common use of PHP is to extract data out of a database such as MySQL and present it on the web pages.

In recent years, there is a quite fashionable word "AMP" which is short for Apache, MySQL and PHP. It is regarded as a golden combination by plenty of programmers. They are all open-source, cheap, easy to get and fast in problem-resolving because there are always a large number of programme engineers and fans putting their great enthusiasm into AMP. As a result, a lot of middle-sized enterprises, even some large companies, they lean to develop their information systems by adopting AMP. That is some reasons towards why PHP has been getting an mature development since it was created.

PHP facilities HTML to produce a dynamic and interactive web page with uses, however, it is not so convenient as HTML. Because it must be interpreted by a server-side PHP engine and the loading speed might be slower than only using HTML. Besides, for the programmer, it is not as much easy as HTML if they would like to test their PHP codes on the computer. As we known, HTML could be parsed directly by web browsers; yet, they have to install an PHP engine to simulate a server-side environment if they wish to do some test.

An Enthusiastic Embrace with ‘The Internet of Things’

The Internet of Things (IoT), a new concept in the IT industry, has attracted the globe’s eyesight within this decade. Some critics discuss that the soon coming fifteen years will be the time of a boom of this industry by which will help people create a ‘smart world’. What an excitement and encouraging industry! It must be an unforgettable experience to engage in this IT revolution. Hence, from this week, I will start my journey on discovering the relevant techniques about this brand new industry, and analyzing the benefits and challenges during its development process.


Since it is a brand new term for most of us, first of all, let’s start this discovery journey from getting some general ideas about it. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term to illustrate the objects all over the world could be connected and communicates with each other via the Internet (Cooper & James 2009, p. 320). Haller, Karnouskos and Schroth. (2008) give a very specific definition as follows:

A world where physical objects are seamlessly integrated into the information network, and where they, the physical objects, can become active participants in business processes. Services are available to interact with these “smart objects” over the Internet, query their state and any information associated with them, taking into account security and privacy issues.

In this way, the IoT could be regarded as a combination of information technologies such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensor networks, database management, network addresses protocols, and other techniques. Some experts claim that the IoT is the practical application of current computer technologies which are integrated into a uniform framework to make them work more efficiently and effectively. Accompanied with the development of RFID and IPv6, the IoT has gained significantly progress. However, it is still in the first stage, and there are abundant improvement spaces and creative techniques and standards needed to be introduced into this area.

I will move on my research on this area gradually this semester…





References

Cooper, J & James, A. 2009, ‘Challenges for database management in the Internet of Things’, IETE Technical Review, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 320-329.

Haller, S., Karnouskos, S. & Schroth, C. 2008, ‘The Internet of Things in an enterprise context’, Future Internet Systems (FIS), vol. 5468, Springer, pp. 14-18.

Client-side Technologies Help Me Build up a Framework

This week I have learnt some now technologies about the Internet and how to build up Internet-based applications, which are the client-side technologies such as XHTML, CSS and Javascript. For a new comer as me, in this week, it is just a brief glance at them, but I’d like to talk a little about them now.
As we known, the internet can be divided into two parts: the client side using web browser to parse the languages like XHTML, CSS and Javascript, and server side on which the PHP, Java and database are deployed. In this way, it is much more reasonable to start the journey of programming from the client side which is directly interactive with human beings.

XHTML is short for the ‘eXtensive HyperText Markup Language’ is a family of XML markup language that is the extended version of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which web pages are written. It is stricter than the former HTML and, nowadays, gradually replaces HTML.

At the beginning, the developers wrote codes using HTML both for the texts and formats of web pages. Later, they found there were plenty of duplicate workloads on writing the same format codes for relevant and consecutive pages.

Therefore, a new concept was introduced in this area which is called ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ (CSS). While HTML only focuses on the content of the text, the responsibility of CSS is to design the layouts. Because the file which contains the CSS is always embedded or outside the HTML files, it becomes very convenient for programmers to uniform and change the layouts without doing the same work again and again.

But only using HTML and CSS, the web page is static and cannot interact with users. How to make a dynamic and interactive website? The programming experts began to search some methods which could solve this issue. Some of them decided to use the language ‘Javascript’ which is also implemented as part of the web browser in order to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites.

Javascript and Java both use the similar syntax and the object-oriented concept from C. But the two languages are unrelated and have very different semantics. The advantage of using Javascript is that it works on the client side so that it could be interpreted very fast than any other languages which work on the server side.

Please check out my learning proposal draft!

Here is the link to my draft learning proposal. Please check it!

http://pandamimi.webuda.com/DMT/LearningProposal.html

Some Interesting Knowledge about Network

Recently, I watched a very interesting video - 'Warriors of the Net' about how the network infrastructure works from one terminal to another through the internet. Here is the link: http://www.warriorsofthe.net/.

As we all known, the first step to learn how to build a website on the internet is to understand the importance of the internet. The internet is a global computer network which provides a way for remote computers to communicate and share services and resources. We should understand the types of connections such as ISDN (Intergrated Services Digital Network) and DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), the connection speeds, the Internet Service Provider (ISP).

From another viewpoint, the Internet can be seen as a set of communication protocals. The data communication protocals are used for different purposes. So there is an international ratified standard which is called 'OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) Model' setting out these purposes in seven layers which are Appllication, Presentation, Session, Tranport, Network, Data and Physical layer. And an alternative model is the TCP/IP Model.

When we are going to build up a website on the Internet, we mainly focus on the Application Layer of protocals like HTTP, SMTP, POP3, FTP, Telnet, etc., which are built on the top of the TCP/IP protocal stack. We need to master the knowledge about the format of IP addresses, data packets, how router and swotch works, domain names, DNS, the meaning of URL, the client-server model, and the world wide web. All of these information constitute the whole structure of the Internet. Before commencing the journey of programming, they are the essential and necessary foundation.

References:
Kinkoph, S.W. 2005, Teach Yourself VISUALLY HTML, 2nd edn, Wiley Publishing, Inc., Hoboken, Canada.
Murphy, B. 2000, Building a Web Site on the Internet, 1st edn, Internet Handbooks, United Kingdom.

Hi, everyone! This is Karen. Welcome to my blog!

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