Eclipse SmartHome 0.10.0 Release Review

Type
Release
State
Successful
End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Release

0.10.0

Description

With this release Eclipse SmartHome provides under the hood improvements along with new bindings and protocol extensions.

The new Units of Measurement API provides a way for bindings to pass measurement values with a unit attached. The framework is able to automatically convert between compatible units on a locale based default or user defined units and offers full scripting support for unit based calculations and comparison.

With an OAuth2 client and a highly customizable HTTP authentication/authorization module the framework now supports a wide range of security aspects. Basic HTTP authentication is delivered with the release.

The new MQTT features are split into separate modules: There is basic protocol support, an embedded MQTT broker, system & user specific MQTT broker connections and along generic topic-to-item mappings an automated discovery of Homie 3.x and Home Assistant compliant topics.

Semantic meaning is a key for future smart home applications. This release offers an predefined ontology which can be attached to items using tags. Built-in synonyms can be extended by instance specific custom synonyms.

For this rease a few new bindings are available: Bose SoundTouch, Sony Audio, OneWire, Homematic, OpenWeatherMap, meteoBlue and Bluetooth LE support. The Bluetooth LE support provides a generic binding along with vendor specific extensions: BlueGiga and blueZ expose USB bluetooth dongles to the framework and Blukii connects to SmartBeacons providing environmental data.

API Certification

The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".

Architectural Issues

A lot of code cleanup and internal refactorings have been undertaken to have maintainable code, which still optimally supports the requirements of extensions that are being implemented for it.

There are still a few parts not yet up to speed with the project's expectations wrt readiness for UI-based configuration (especially sitemaps and persistence services) - for this reason, the project is still kept in the incubation phase.

Security Issues

No security issues were reported.

Conforms To UI/UX Guidelines
Not verified
Communities

The community (adopters as well as contributors) is steadily growing and the website lists some of the more prominent adopters. The number of forks has increased by about 50% over the last year and we see regular activity in the discussion forum, the issue tracker and the PRs. The project did NOT gain any new committers, though. This is most likely related to its overall complexity and the required time to properly fulfill such a role.