Speed up IoT Development with Middlewares. Round one: Kii

Ever since the creation of the IoT division at Monterail, we've been trying to solve one particular question. In terms of developing an IoT project from scratch, when should we use an existing IoT solution? At first, it seems that we could build an IoT project from scratch instead of using another platform. We have a talented team that can deliver beautiful and bulletproof applications. After deeper consideration, we agreed that this decision is more complicated that it seems and requires further investigation. So to answer this question, we conducted some research about IoT platforms that could speed up the development process.

Interesting start: Kii

The first one is Kii. Its website says that it can “speed up your IoT initiatives”. This is exactly what we want to do. It is a mobile backend as a service. What does that mean? It provides a middleware that stands between the firmware on a hardware device and the end-user application (website, phone app, etc.).

Kii gives us a lot of possibilities: user management, group management, data management, push notifications, custom server scripts, analytics and online tests. In a nutshell, it eliminates the necessity of creating and maintaining the backend side of an application. Furthermore, Kii created two sets of tools for enhancing the development process for hardware (Thing-IF SDK) and end-user applications (Kii SDK). The first one is written purely in C and the second one is available on Android (Java), iOS (Objective-C, Swift), JavaScript and Unity. Of course, there is a standard REST API if you prefer it this way. There is also another advantage for this IoT platform: it handles security. Kii Cloud allows you to set custom access controls so it can limit the access to your application data and features.

At first look, it seems that this is the perfect solution for most IoT projects. At the beginning of development, we should double-check how much the project can gain by using Kii.

Summary

Security:

Pros	Cons
two different access levels	extensive configuration: user can set up wrong privileges by mistake
access levels can be customized	closed source of Kii
https and access tokens

Scalability:

Pros	Cons
cloud service, scalable to any size	none

Flexibility:

Pros	Cons
huge number of features	custom scripts might not be efficient in big data
custom backend node.js scripts	old version of node.js
	constrained list of allowed modules
	code testing might be difficult

Development tools (SDKs, etc):

Pros	Cons
SDK in many languages	none
REST API

First time configuration:

Pros	Cons
a lot of features	very time consuming

Documentation:

Pros	Cons
extensive	navigation
whole system is well-documented	search engine