1.7.0
This minor release introduces the following new features
- Apache Kafka is now supported as a messaging system for command messages. This can be enabled by configuring protocol adapters to use Hono’s new Kafka-based client. Please refer to Hono Kafka Client Configuration for details. The new Command & Control API for Kafka defines how applications can use Apache Kafka to send command messages to devices. Note that support for Kafka base messaging is still considered an experimental feature.
- The Device Registry Management API has been extended to support an optional unique identifier for trust anchors belonging to a tenant. The file, JDBC and MongoDB based device registries support this feature. Please refer to the Device registry management API for details.
- The LoraWAN protocol adapter has been extended with support for The Things Stack provider.
- The LoraWAN protocol adapter now supports Command & Control for providers Chirpstack, Firefly and Loriot.
- Added (experimental) Quarkus based variant of the Authentication service.
- Added (experimental) Quarkus based variant of the CoAP protocol adapter.
- Added (experimental) Quarkus based variant of the Command Router protocol adapter.
- The container images for the (experimental) Quarkus based variant of Hono compenents are now being published on Docker Hub as well. The JVM based image names contain a -quarkus suffix whereas the native image names contain a -quarkus-native suffix. Note that the Quarkus based protocol adapter images do not support using the Device Connection service but require a connection to the Command Router service being configured instead.
- The MQTT adapter now lets devices subscribe on a new error topic to get informed about errors during the processing of telemetry, event or command response message. With such an error subscription in place, the default behaviour on such errors is now to keep the MQTT connection open. Please refer to the MQTT Adapter User Guide for details.
- The MQTT adapter now supports mapping the command payload through an external http service.
- The Command Router component has been promoted from tech preview to fully supported.
- The AMQP adapter now closes the network connection to the device if any terminal errors happen. Please refer to the AMQP Adapter User Guide for details.
The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".
The protocol adapters and the Command Router service have been adapted to support dynamic discovery of the messaging infrastructure that should be used for a tenant. The type of infrastructure, AMQP 1.0 or Kafka, can be configured at the tenant level. Support for using Kafka as the messaging infrastructure is considered experimental for now.
The CoAP, the Lora adapters and the Command Router service are now also available in a variant based on Quarkus instead of the Spring Boot framework. The plan is to gradually provide Quarkus based implementations of all standard adapters and services that come with Hono and then remove the dependency on Spring Boot altogether.
The Device Connection service has been deprecated and will be removed completely in Hono 2.0.0. Users should instead use the Command Router service.
From the community calls we conduct every two weeks and from the issues being raised on GitHub we seem to attract several people who use Hono in production and/or who are evaluating Hono for such use cases.