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Advanced REST Client - Desktop application
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Add CoAP protocol support #83

Open AndreMaz opened 6 years ago

AndreMaz commented 6 years ago

This is a feature request to add support for CoAP protocol. CoAP can be seen as a lightweight version of HTTP that is specially designed for Internet of Things.

Who will benefit from this feature? Pretty much everyone who is working on IoT and wants to test their CoAP-based REST APIs.

Overview Since the Web of Things is becoming the thing (pun intended) where even constrained devices expose their data though REST APIs it becomes necessary to have a reliable testing tool. However, to this date, there is none. So adding CoAP support would be a really great feature.

List every UI surface belonging to or potentially affected by this feature: None, since CoAP borrows almost everything from HTTP

Do you expect this feature to be fairly stable? How might it be extended or changed in the future? CoAP protocol was standardized in 2014 and since then haven't changed. It received couple of extensions CoAP Observe (standardized in 2015) and CoAP Blockwise Transfers (standardized in 2016). The developers state "CoAP was developed as an Internet Standards Document, RFC 7252. The protocol has been designed to last for decades."

jarrodek commented 6 years ago

Hi, Thank you for the feature request. It is something I would like to explore as it seems to be interesting idea. Technically ARC support binary messaging but there's no UI component for that. I have to research the protocol to see what I actually need to do (so far I got the general idea), then redesign the request panel if needed and finally update the transport library and the UI.

Currently I have no resources to work on this but it's already in my ideas list which is one step from being put into the roadmap.

AndreMaz commented 6 years ago

Hi, thanks for your answer @jarrodek

Currently, there is only one CoAP client that I'm aware off. It's available for an outdated (pre-Quantum) Firefox and for Chrome. Its not great but you can get the idea (and maybe some inspiration) about the functionalities that CoAP client needs.

Just to give you an example of CoAP's userbase: Open Connectivity Foundation, a consortium supported my Microsoft, LG, Intel, Samsung and many others, rely heavily on CoAP. Also, the W3C's proposal relies on CoAP (among other protocols)

stale[bot] commented 2 years ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity and is not currently prioritized. It will be closed in a week if no further activity occurs :)