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MQTT turns 25

andypiper.co.uk

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Re: MQTT turns 25

#71

Post by rendaw »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #69
rendaw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read someone somewhere saying "why not just use TCP" and for my IOT project plain TCP was fine. MQTT didn't have infinite queuing which was important for my use case, and if I'm going to have to track message ids to feed into MQTT which tracks its own message ids to send to the broker, why use it at all. I'm not sure what the sweet spot is, unless it's just interfacing with projects that have already committed to M…

MQTT is pub/sub protocol with a concept of brokers and clients. It's not in anyway comparable to TCP. You could rewrite an equivalent of MQTT on top of TCP in a fairly straightforward way - MQTT is simple by design - but I think you take the question from the wrong end. Why would you write a new protocol when MQTT already exists and does the job?

The effort to vet MQTT providers, integrate them, and configure everything properly, understand and work around MQTT and implementation quirks, and the protocol overhead were greater than doing something directly on top of TCP, and I don't believe I lost any features that I needed.

Re: MQTT turns 25

#73

Post by willhschmid »

this_user wrote: post #16

Having recently used MQTT for a project, I can't say that I'm a huge fan. There are a lot of options in the protocol where it's not immediately clear what they do and why they are important, or in what combination they need to be used to make sure things work as intended, and the documentation is often not great at explaining. Part of this may also be on the Eclipse Mosquitto Python client that I had been using. I to…

MQTT does have its nuances, and diving into the specifications is sometimes required to grasp all the options fully. That said, for most cases, simply focusing on the API for the library you're using should suffice. It sounds like the real issue you're facing is more with the library than the protocol itself.

If you're open to using Lua, you might find this client library more straightforward: https://realtimelogic.com/ba/doc/en/lua/MQTT.html. It’s designed to be simple to use and works with the BAS runtime, which supports many platforms, including microcontrollers like the ESP32: https://realtimelogic.com/downloads/bas/ESP32/

Re: MQTT turns 25

#74

Post by baruchthescribe »

ocschwar wrote: post #63
baruchthescribe wrote: post #8

Reposting my comment from five years ago: I once had a client where the only port available for me to use on their firewalls was for MQTT (1883) because that's how we were getting sensor data from them. They would not open anything else for us no matter how we implored them so I wrote a live TCP wrapper over MQTT to get around it. It was a local multithreaded TCP daemon that listened for outbound requests on a certai…

So you basically implemented an MQTT-Sockets protocol. Which you could then use to connect to a WebSockets server on the other side.

I'm trying to remember the reason we couldn't use MQTT-Sockets. I do remember we couldn't though. Also we could not use Web sockets server side.

Re: MQTT turns 25

#75

Post by kerblang »

xnyan wrote: post #66
kerblang wrote: post #60

I don't buy the b.s. around MQTT being so lightweight/efficient/etc. It's just using TCP/IP. Maybe by the standards of the day that was comparatively special, but I've never seen any real evidence for the claim besides this constant bragging. I guess it's nice that MQTT is a standard and so you have a way to connect to off-the-shelf devices that are enabled. I still think there are better options for pub/sub and mess…

> I still think there are better options for pub/sub and message queues, esp. if you need to failover on the consumer side. Sincerely, what are these options?

The various message-queueing products, Kafka, et al. Sorry for late response and not responding sooner...

Re: MQTT turns 25

#76

Post by BrandoElFollito »

I discovered MQTT with Home Assistant (a home automation solution, no, sorry, THE home automation solution).

It helped me to understand pubsub philosophy and I ended up using it for my personal development - to the point where I was misusing it (which is the typical path with technologies one discovers)

It is a great protocol for home automation but quickly gets annoying for more complex scenarios.

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