Cloud-Platform for Rapid Prototyping of Internet of Things Applications - Tiles Toolkit
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) has experienced an increasing amount of interest in recent years, and is today one of the most significant technologies being relevant to a wide range of industries and having potential for high impact. One of the expected trends in IoT is that in the future, everyone will be developers, and that the consumer market will lead to exploring new and unexpected opportunities and use cases for IoT products. To discover these opportunities, innovators should be given free reign to experiment with new ideas. Unfortunately, application development for the Internet of Things is currently a complex task and requires expertise in multiple fields, which makes it one of the main hurdles for widespread adoption of IoT technology.
This thesis aims to provide a cloud platform supporting rapid development and deployment of applications for the Internet of Things. This includes a web-based development environment providing functionality beyond that of a general-purpose IDE. The platform also provides a high-level abstraction facilitating end-user programming (EUP) and simple deployment and management of applications in the cloud.
A user evaluation was conducted to identify the perceived value of the platform and its features. The platform was well-received by the users, and the evaluation indicated that several of the features were perceived as highly valuable. As the research topic is broad, a mixed methods research (MMR) methodology is adopted to produce generalizable results. Qualitative data is gathered through literature reviews and interviews with users, and quantitative data is collected through questionnaires measuring the user experience and the users perceived value of the features of the platform.
This thesis is part of the TILES project at NTNU.