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The Basics
Before looking at examples, let’s go over some Platform’s basic concepts to help you getting started in no time.
Devices are the entities, either physical or virtual, that can send data. A Device has also an ‘inbox’ through which it can receive messages from the outside.
A channel is a semantic representation of a data stream, that can be selectively enabled for a given device. You can think of them as conversation topics on which you can enable specific functionalities through our Plugins system. For example, you can create a channel named input that stores the data it receives, and a channel named alarms that triggers a push notification or an email every time it receives a packet.
Plugins are specific functionalities that power up your data streams You can tie one or multiple plugins to a channel to enable new features like Persistence, Notifications and Post Processing. Users Users are the basic entities of your organization. You can create as many users as you want, and assign them a role.
Each user can be provided with access keys that enable a quick and easy way to authenticate API calls, without exposing the basic credentials. Access Keys are also used for authentication for Live Stream, that we’re going to see shortly. There’s no limit to the number of access keys that can be created for a user.
A Live Stream is a handy way to aggregate channels together. Through its simple interface you can pick available data sources (i.e. device’s channels) and pack data in an unified stream. This stream can then be accessed in real time in order to read available messages.