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A Standalone WebAssembly Development Environment for the Internet of Things

2021; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-030-74296-6_27

1611-3349

István Koren,

Software System Performance and Reliability

In Industry 4.0, there is a growing demand to perform high-performance and latency-sensitive computations at the edge. Increasingly, machine data is not only collected but also processed and translated into actionable decisions influencing production parameters in real-time. However, heterogeneous hardware in the Internet of Things prevents the adoption of consistent development and deployment structures as known from service containers. WebAssembly is a recent hardware-agnostic bytecode format that is capable of running not only in the browser, but also on microcontrollers and in cloud environments. In this article, we argue that this web technology can have a real impact by leveraging tools and programming languages that web engineers are familiar with. As a first step, we present a proof-of-concept integrated development and deployment environment to execute WebAssembly modules on microcontrollers. Its key feature is a built-in web server that provides a self-contained browser-based IDE to directly develop, compile and flash AssemblyScript code to a device. In this sense, the Web of Things will unfold a streamlined development and deployment context for the agile and low-latency operationalization of adjustable data streaming and action-oriented process adaptations for industrial devices.