MQTT Lets Objects Talk To Each Other

The world is slowly starting to speak a new language. It is not a language like the ones we know, but rather a way of understanding between everything and everyone in existence. With the rise of the Internet of Things, where practically everything has a built-in chip, it is important that all these devices are able to communicate clearly. As long as my smart thermostat cannot ‘talk’ with the automatic lock on my back door, there is still some ground to be covered. And that is exactly what MQTT is going to do.

We are living in an age where we as people of the world finally can communicate with each other in a more or less coherent way. The same unfortunately cannot be said from our recently invented electronic devices. Pretty much every device in existence is very much able to communicate (send and receive data) with itself and similar devices, but as long as they are not able to talk with all the other so-called ‘smart’ devices, we’re a long way from the propheted ‘digital world’.

MQTT

But there is some good news: a group of technology companies, including IBM, Cisco Systems, Red Hat and Tibco, officialy introduced the answer to all of these daunting problems. It is poetically named the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, or MQTT in short. It is not necessarily the digital equivalent of Esperanto, i.e. a constructed universal language, but more a messenger of sorts through which a variety of devices can communicate with each other. Its potential within the Internet of Things is often compared to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP that we know and love from our daily use of the Internet.

MQTT

So what are the implications for this breakthrough in the Internet of Things? For starters, this could mean that the future that we are used to seeing in utopian videos made by large tech companies like Microsoft and Google might actually slowly but steadily be coming true. An exciting prospect to be sure; the whole world around us turning into something interactive and intelligent. Let’s take care to not forget communicating ourselves as well.