Work with EI to Adopt DPWS
EI Stack Adoption
The core of the Life|ware system is its DPWS stack — software that leverages Web Services to create a truly powerful, extensible system that can communicate with a wide variety of devices.
In EI's Life|ware home control software, the DPWS stack creates a powerful, extensible system that can communicate with a wide variety of home control devices such as HVAC, lighting, and distributed audio devices. Exceptional Innovation's DPWS stack converts the programming interface for a controller (such as a security system) or a device (such as a light or audio switcher) into a Web Services device which can be implemented via the Ethernet connection to the customer's local server.
As the first company to implement a DPWS-based control system, Exceptional Innovation has been working to help hardware manufacturers reap the benefits of embedding DPWS into their hardware. Within the world of home automation, several major lighting, security, and audio companies are already embedding the technology into their products, and new requests are coming in consistently. To date, EI has published WSDLs in 14 different classes and has used DPWS to support devices from 27 different manufacturers.
The basic stack includes the code to fully implement the Web Services specification. Additional device-specific code required to implement a device will depend on the complexity of the device interface and the number of devices hosted by a single DPWS server instance. The device-specific code is minimized in our implementation. Today a fairly robust device implementation requires about 80K of memory. While running, the requirement grows to about 500K — including the operating system. This size quote includes a DPWS service with four different classes of device. Basic software requirements of the platform are C runtime support, Sockets and SSL, as well as an OS — Microsoft Windows, Windows CE, Linux or an embedded RTOS.
With active interest and support from hardware manufacturers, Exceptional Innovation has been able to very quickly implement, test and release DPWS stacks for a variety of systems and device types. We continue to work closely with industry leaders to develop DPWS technology for a variety of devices, as well as to further develop DPWS classification standards that apply to Web Services-based devices.
Working with EI
Manufacturers interested in capitalizing on the benefits of Web Services can work with Exceptional Innovation to have EI's lightweight DPWS stack incorporated directly into their product.
Contact Exceptional Innovation for more information about DPWS and the business benefits is represents. Services we provide include WSDL reference documents for each supported device class, consulting services, requirements planning assistance, and development services.
