[Development] Adding Qt CoAP

[Maurice Kalinowski]

Hey,

> > One of the items mentioned has been CoAP and that it would make a
> > great addition to Qt. Interestingly, there has been discussions
> > between the Qt Company and Witekio about exactly this topic. Thanks to
> > the people at Witekio these resulted in actual code already available
> > to get reviewed. To avoid any duplicate effort and have everyone
> > participating as early as possible a new repository is needed.
> 
> Hi Maurice
> 
> That's great. As you may have seen from my emails, I am a great supporter of
> CoAP and I'm really pleased that The Qt Company and others also think it's
> worth having in Qt.
> 
[Kalinowski Maurice] 
Absolutely, also thank you for opening the discussion on the mailing list. It has been a great enabler for this.


> > Name of the project: Qt CoAP
> >
> > Responsible person:
> > Cedric Amarger
> > Gerrit user/email: Cedric Amarger <camarger at witekio.com> Desired
> > repository name: qtcoap
> >
> > For now, I will leave any technical detail to Cedric.
> 
> I don't think we can discuss the format of such an implementation until we
> have DTLS support. For one thing, it isn't clear to me that we'll have a
> QDtlsSocket class in the first place, or whether it'll be a simple non- QIODevice
> wrapper on top of QUdpSocket.
> 
[Kalinowski Maurice] 
Sure, which is also why the idea is to have it in a separate repository for now. Initially there was the consideration to put this into Qt Network and if so, in what fashion. This could still happen, but let's get this thing rolling and then discuss where to place it.


> I'm also wondering if we shouldn't have a bigger repo for IoT-related things,
> instead of creating a small one for each thing. Does it make sense to start
> thinking of "qtiot" ? Then we could merge qtopcua in it and could also add
> MQTT, DDS, DPS support and others.
> 

 [Kalinowski Maurice] 
Interestingly I had a similar discussion today whether it makes sense to have such a "super" repo as in connectivity having NFC and Bluetooth. However, connectivity is also a good example that this has not been a good idea. While many are interested in Bluetooth, a minority actually requires NFC. In the IoT sector that is even more fragmented, not even starting to think about what we see as "(Industry) Automation". Just as an example, while you have a bigger user group for DDS from your employer's perspective, clearly MQTT is the big item for the Qt Company's customers, based on the discussions I have been involved in.

Hence, I'd rather object for having one repository for all. Then again, we could also think about a IoT repository with just submodules, meaning if you're interested in the whole package, you just clone that. But that also depends on the product design of what has been announced as Qt for Automation being an AddOn to Qt.

While there is a session for OPC/UA already marked for Qt CS, this is certainly a good place to discuss the bigger plan with all parties involved.

Maurice