Eclipse Ditto 3.3.0

3.3.0

Description

Eclipse Ditto 3.3.0 focuses on the following areas:

  • Support replacing certain json objects in a merge/PATCH command instead of merging their fields
  • Implicitly convert a merge/PATCH command to a "Create Thing" if thing is not yet existing
  • Provide option to skip a modification in the "twin" if the value "is equal" to the previous value
  • Addition of the DevOps API endpoints to Ditto's OpenAPI definition
  • Improve DittoProtocol MessagePath to be aware of message subject
  • Support alternative way of specifying "list" query parameters
  • UI enhancements:
    • Enhance Ditto-UI to dynamically configure log levels of Ditto
    • Building and packaging the UI with esbuild

The following non-functional work is also included:

  • Provide official Eclipse Ditto Helm chart via Docker Hub and move its sources to Ditto Git repository

The following notable fixes are included:

  • Fix that redeliveries for acknowledgeable connectivity messages were issued too often
  • Fix WoT dispatcher starvation by adding timeouts to fetch models
Architectural Issues

Ditto's codebase is implemented in Java. By default Java objects are mutable which does not work well in highly scalable, message driven architectures, as possible side-effects during runtime may occur when concurrently modifying objects. Because of that the Ditto team decided to use immutable objects wherever and whenever possible. Immutablity of the objects is ensured in unit tests.

Ditto's model modules and also the Ditto Java client are OSGi bundles so that they may be used in OSGi environments without much effort. The model modules are configured to be checked by a "binary compatibility checker" in the Maven build so that APIs are not broken unintentionally.

On a level higher than the model, Ditto uses a microservice based architecture. As Ditto's microservices are interacting via an event driven approach, Ditto provides a very modular setup on the microservice level meaning that single services must be not started at all if their functionality is not needed. Another benefit from this architecture is that the services may be scaled horizontally if more resources are required.

Ditto utilizes the CQRS and EventSourcing pattern and mainly uses "inserts" (append only) into the database in favor to "updates" in order to get a better performance when doing database writes. The only exception is the "search" microservice which uses traditional CRUD in order to update its search index.

Security Issues

There are no security issues known at the time of this writing.

Non-Code Aspects

Ditto comes with:

Conforms To UI/UX Guidelines
Not verified
End of Life

None.

Standards

Ditto is able to process AMQP 1.0, AMQP 0.9.1, MQTT 3.1.1 and MQTT 5 messages which are all standardized (IoT) protocols.

Ditto can use JSON Web Tokens specified by RFC 7519 in order to extract "subjects" (e.g. a user-id) to use for the access control to twins.

Ditto's API documentation is defined using the OpenAPI specification 3.0.0 allowing both creation of an interactive HTML-based documentation and creation of skelettons for various programming languages based on that specification.

Ditto supports the W3C Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description 1.1 standard.

Communities

Users of Ditto ask their questions via these channels:

  • The Gitter chatroom of Ditto
  • Via GitHub discussions for questions and general discussions
  • A Stackoverflow tag "eclipse-ditto" on which community quersions are answered by our committers
  • The mailing-list (ditto-dev@eclipse.org) is not actively used and watched