Learning Platform for Smart City Application Development

With the emerging trend of the Internet of Things and Smart City environments, new trends have arisen in building applications, too. The current approach to application development, known as monolithic architecture, is not suitable for the newest appliances. Recently, the microservice-based application architecture has emerged as a potential solution that could meet the imposed challenges. In order to educate new generations of software and IT engineers to be able to develop such microservice-based applications, educators at universities should establish an efficient platform to ensure this process. This article presents the portable and lightweight platform for teaching application development based on microservices. The platform is focused on supporting lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocols, such as MQTT, and built-on open-source hardware development boards such as Arduino/Genuino. This Smart City learning platform is designed to enable the collaborative development of systems, applications and services for the cities of the future, and it should be efficient enough to support the learning of all the necessary skills that can be used for the development of complex and large-scale systems. The architecture of the proposed platform, as well as its elements are presented in this article.