TinyLink 2.0: integrating device, cloud, and client development for IoT applications

The recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of IoT (Internet of Things) applications. A typical IoT application usually consists of three essential parts: the device side, the cloud side, and the client side. The development of a complete IoT application is very difficult for non-expert developers because it involves drastically different technologies and complex interactions between different sides. Unlike traditional IoT development platforms which use separate approaches for these three sides, we present TinyLink 2.0, an integrated IoT development approach with a single coherent language. It achieves high expressiveness for diverse IoT applications by an enhanced IFTTT rule design and a virtual sensor mechanism which helps developers express application logic with machine learning. Moreover, TinyLink 2.0 optimizes the IoT application performance by using both static and dynamic optimizers, especially for resource-constrained IoT devices. We implement TinyLink 2.0 and evaluate it with eight case studies, a user study, and a detailed evaluation of the proposed programming language as well as the performance optimizers. Results show that TinyLink 2.0 can speed up IoT development significantly compared with existing approaches from both industry and academia, while still achieving high expressiveness.