obgm
commented
3 years ago Thanks for sharing this. Having a Copper-like tool is definitely worth the effort.
- IMO, the coding should allow UTF-8 character input as this is default in many places (text/plain but also CoAP URIs). I am not sure how good nim is at this but you could simply use the system's locale and convert internally to UTF-8 where required.
- I think adding some basic functionality for public key crypto would be really nice to support testing of (1) raw public keys and (2) different certificate modes.
- Output filters for pretty-printing JSON and CBOR would be nice to have.
kb2ma
This issue really is for anyone interested, but particularly @obgm and @mrdeep1.
I have just created Release-0.2 of Cotel, and would appreciate your review. Cotel provides a GUI for CoAP messaging similar to Copper, but it is a standalone desktop application rather than a browser add-on. Since Copper hasn't been updated in a couple of years, it seemed like a good time to try a new approach. Release-0.2 includes a pre-built Linux x86_64 binary, which I hope is convenient.
Cotel uses libcoap internally via the Nim language. Nim is well suited to an app like Cotel because it provides garbage collection and generally a higher level of abstraction. At the same time it compiles to C, so it's easy to interface with libraries and it provides a responsive UI.
I would appreciate your reactions in a few areas:
Overall do you think it's a worthwhile/useful project? Do you have any general feedback on intuitiveness of design? Of course I'd appreciate hearing about any errors too. :-)
Where text data is required, I fall back to ASCII-only. Where would it be useful to include more Latin or full UTF-8? My keyboard doesn't use any other characters, so I don't feel the pain that others may from this restriction.
What features would you like to see next? Security is high on my list. Presently Cotel supports a single PSK key. IMO, the variety of security options in libcoap is one of its strengths. I think users would find it useful to be able to easily compare different types of security as well as different implementations.
I'm also personally interested in LwM2M, so I plan to add Observe capability as well.
Thanks for any feedback!