Developing M2M applications with Mango

Abstract

Mango is an open source alternative for Machine to Machine software. It enables users to access and control electronic sensors, devices, and machines over multiple protocols simultaneously. However, Mango was designed for the desktop. It relies heavily on JavaScript to render its graphical pages. While rendering, massive amounts of data are being transferred between the Mango server and the browser. Furthermore, because of the continuous polling for new data, it can easily hog the CPU of the computer displaying said data. As a result of these limitations, Mango is hardly usable on a wide range of – mainly older – mobile devices.

The commissioners of the project at the JAMK University of Applied Sciences wanted to investigate the possibility of other means of accessing the data collected by Mango. Specifically, the software had to be examined and documented if it was achievable to access the data directly by an external lightweight application written in, for example, PHP.

The analysis showed that because of the nature how Mango stores many of its crucial data – by serializing Java objects into BLOB columns – direct access poses challenges. However, with the help of Mango's ability to serialize objects into JSON format, a new path opens to developers aiming for mobile access.