Throughout JavaOne (and Oracle OpenWorld) the movements of attendees were being tracked in an impressive demonstration that powerful applications of the Internet of Things can be rapidly put together in order to gather a host of data with relatively little expense or effort. Throughout the conference, IoT in Motion has been efficiently counting and tracking conference attendees in various locations to reveal the power and utility of end-to-end data collection and management technologies. IoT in Motion is a collaboration among Oracle, Eurotech, Hitachi Communication Technologies America (CTA), and Hitachi Consulting.

Oracle’s Jennifer Douglas provided a concise overview of the technology: “We have Hitachi Consulting, who helped build the actual application that is running the data, using an Oracle Exalytic box over at Open World and the Oracle BI (Business Intelligence) dashboard. People from the Oracle BI team also contributed to this. Hitachi CTA has their SuperJ running in conjunction with Oracle’s Java SE embedded through a gateway to the Eurotech Everyware Cloud, which collects the raw data. Then the Exalytic box compiles the data and converts it into something we can actually utilize.” All of the technology is running on Java.  

IoT in Motion is not to be confused with security tracking using face recognition software which can recognize and identify the movements of individual people. While it can distinguish a dog or a vehicle from a person, the stereoscopic camera merely registers and counts people going in and out of the spaces without monitoring any features of individual people. No one’s privacy is violated in the process of tracking.

Oleg Kostukovsky of Oracle’s Java Embedded Global Business Unit, articulated the importance of IoT in Motion for the Java developer. “This solution from end to end is built on Java,” explained Kostukovsky, “all the way from the embedded device to the back end. So a Java developer can leverage existing Java skills to develop the application. All of the underlying pieces and blocks to enable application development are already in place, so if you are customizing an application running on a gateway, there is a Java framework available for that. It’s the type of environment your typical java programmer is used to so they don’t need to know about any specific embedded stuff or connectivity with sensors. On the back end, we are leveraging Oracle middleware products – pure Java based. You can develop Java code and connect Java adapters to different sources of data. So there is nothing you need to know except your basic Java development skills – it’s very similar to a Java enterprise scenario. So the learning curve is very low.”