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How IoT is changing the course of web development

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While, for most people, the changes brought by IoT will be experienced via smart devices, it’s important to realize that IoT is also having a huge impact on software and web developers

Linking web development to IoT might not seem like an obvious step but let me explain. IoT devices rely on web servers, and the data they produce is stored in the cloud. Most of these devices communicate with each other via web protocols, and the UIs used to interact with them are normally built using web development tools.

In addition, many IoT devices use the internet actively. Plenty of these devices, such as those used in smart TVs and wearables, can display web pages. Others, like Amazon’s Echo, use bespoke browsers to extract information from the web in response to user queries. For all these reasons, the rise of IoT is changing the way that web developers work. In this article, we’ll take a look at the keyways that it is doing that.

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IoT In Web Development

Before looking at the ways that IoT is changing web development, it’s important to recognize the biggest challenge for web developers in working for (and with) IoT devices. This is the volume of data that these devices produce.

The sheer scale of these data means that websites that work with IoT need a level of data handling and analysis functionality that was unheard of even five years ago. Take a look at the numbers, and this becomes immediately apparent. Gartner, Inc. forecasts that the enterprise and automotive Internet of Things (IoT) market alone will grow to 5.8 billion devices in 2020, a 21% increase from 2019. Though these sectors will likely dominate the IoT market, the same research found that the use of IoT in retail is also likely to increase significantly, with 440 million devices predicted to be in use in that sector by 2020.

Add to this, the fact that these massive number of devices are each producing a huge amount of data. The data produced by IoT is measured in zettabytes, a unit equal to one trillion gigabytes. Cisco has estimated that by the end of 2019, IoT will generate more than 500 zettabytes per year. In the years to come, the same study predicts that this number will grow exponentially.

Four key trends in IoT in Web Development

For web developers, IoT brings huge analytics challenges. These are starting to be met however, by advanced approaches to IoT analytics, and a number of off-the-shelf tools that make working with this volume of data (relatively) easy, to the extent that even the best consumer-level website builders now offer tools for working with huge datasets. On the other hand, IoT also offers huge opportunities for web designers: an RTInsights survey shows that 51 percent of software developers view IoT as the most important driver of change in the industry. These changes can be understood by looking at four key trends in IoT web development.

#1 Both web and IoT developers prefer Java, JavaScript, and C

At the broadest level, IoT is driving large-scale changes in the languages and software used by web developers. There has been a huge increase in the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) among developers. In their overview of the SaaS market, research firm Bluetree.ai found that 86% of the surveyed organizations expected at least 80 percent of their software needs to be met by SaaS after 2022.

The advantages of SaaS for web developers working with IoT is that this software model allows them to work with bespoke software tailored for working with IoT devices and protocols. Oracle, for instance, offers a suite of SaaS tools for developers to harness the power of IoT, paid for — like the majority of SaaS software — on a subscription model.

Alongside the rise of SaaS, IoT is also cementing Java, JavaScript, and C as the languages of choice for web developers. This is because IoT is also based on these languages. In a recent IoT developer survey, for instance, Java, C, and JavaScript were named the top three languages for building IoT solutions. Since JavaScript still dominates web development, with 95% of all websites built using this language, it’s likely that the close relationship between web development and IoT will persist long into the future. JavaScript, in particular, now offers a huge number of libraries for working with IoT devices.

#2 Evolving UIs redefining developing ‘for the web’

Another major impact of IoT on web design has been the rise of non-traditional user interfaces. Many advances in user interface technology have actually been driven by the industrial Internet of things: in high-pressure industrial environments, engineers have sought to make the way they interact with technology safer, more reliable, and more intuitive.

These advances are now becoming mainstream, though. “Electricity smart metering, both residential and commercial will boost the adoption of IoT among utilities,” said Peter Middleton, senior director analyst at Gartner. “Physical security, where building intruder detection and indoor surveillance use cases will drive volume, will be the second-largest user of IoT endpoints in 2020.”

All of these IoT devices will require intuitive user interfaces, and (like most of the IoT interfaces around today) these will be based on web applications. As IoT devices like these become mainstream, the very idea of ‘web development’ as primarily focused on the design of websites will pass away. Instead, developing ‘for the web’ will be a hybrid discipline that includes the design of UIs for smart devices, smart houses, and smart vehicles. As such, innovative user interfaces are already becoming a major topic of research for web designers. In just a few years, it’s likely that websites will begin incorporating gestures and voice commands in order to stay relevant.

The ultimate outcome of this process might be that the ‘website’, as we currently understand it, will cease to be visible to the average consumer. Alexa and Amazon.com, for example, are already integrated fairly seamlessly. That gives Amazon web devs another audience to design for: instead of thinking primarily about customers looking at the Amazon.com page, they must now ensure that the website is accessible and efficient for Alexa queries as well.

#3 New attack surfaces mean new security threats

Security has always been a major concern for the IoT sector. As Wired put it, “the Internet of things security crisis has persisted for decades, producing a seemingly endless stream of under-secured consumer gadgets, corporate phones, printers, networking equipment, medical devices, and critical infrastructure sensors and controllers,” and the techniques that hackers have used to attack these systems have been varied: “IoT devices have been conscripted into massive botnets, compromised for nation-state reconnaissance, hacked to mine cryptocurrency, and manipulated in assaults on power grids.”

The security of IoT devices might not seem like it should concern web developers, but it does. That’s because web design practices are often implied within the weakness of the IoT as a whole. In fact, according to McKinsey in 2017, security was a major challenge for the growth of the IoT.

For web developers, this means that IoT represents a potentially huge source of vulnerabilities for their systems. Much work remains to be done in this area, but some solutions are beginning to appear. The fact is, primary vulnerabilities of an IoT system actually arise during UI development and design, and not from the hardware.That means web developers need to make use of advanced user authentication and user access management, and make sure that data and communications are secured and encrypted whenever they pass between discrete sections of web apps.

#4 Backend design is evolving

All of these trends — the increased reliance on Java, JavaScript, and C, the use of advanced UIs, and new security threats — are also having an impact on back-end design. In short, the back-end interfaces that web developers provide to clients need to be more user-friendly than ever before.

The reasons for this are a direct consequence of the other trends in web development. Firstly, clients will be making increasing use of JavaScript and other web development languages, and the level of fluency in these languages among the average website owner is limited. This means that back-end interfaces need to provide a way for website owners to work directly with code in an intuitive, accessible way.

Similarly, the ability to work with innovative UIs, such as those that rely on voice and gesture, is an increasingly common requirement for web back-ends. In years past, it was only the largest companies (think Amazon and Alexa) that made use of these interfaces. As more and more companies come to use IoT, however, even smaller website owners will require that the tools they use to manage their sites be able to handle these types of input.

Finally, the increased security threat presented by IoT devices means that back-ends will need to be more sophisticated than ever. Website owners and administrators who use their web apps to monitor and interact with IoT devices are highly exposed to these threats, and the back-ends they work with should provide them with tools for identifying and managing them.

The Future: Developing for the IoT

As you’ve read, IoT represents something of a paradigm shift in the way that web developers work. Whilst, on the surface, the link between IoT and web development might seem tenuous, in reality, they are intertwined. Since, IoT relies on web apps to connect devices, to provide UIs for them, and to secure them, web developers are at the forefront of the development of the technology.

In the broadest possible terms, IoT requires the very idea of web development to be re-thought. Instead of web devs working on websites that are primarily designed to be used by humans, IoT requires that information be stored online in a way that it can be accessed by smart devices. This may mean, ultimately, that the idea of the ‘internet’, as we now experience it, passes away: instead of humans clicking through websites, they will interact with the web through a network of IoT devices.

In practice, this means that web developers will assume more importance than ever before. And so, for all the challenges that the IoT brings with it, it is also likely to make quality, secure web development the keystone of a highly connected world. Assuming, of course, that web developers can keep up with the rate of change.

You can learn more about how to access data from a web server and how to build our own web server inside ESP32 from our book, ‘Internet of Things Projects with ESP32’ written by Agus Kurniawan. This book will also help you build an IoT monitoring system with ESP32 and will guide you to connect it with Amazon AWS.

The post How IoT is changing the course of web development appeared first on Gaurav-Aroraa Blog.


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