Tuning with Kii Cloud SDK for Thing

The Kii Cloud SDK for Thing provides you a mean to fine-tune your implementation.

You can quickly develop necessary functions with Thing Interaction Framework that provides APIs modeled after best practices for leveraging things in IoT solutions. At the same time, you might find difficult to use those APIs to develop functions specific to your own needs because they are designed for certain functional models.

In this case, you can flexibly satisfy broader requirements by building your system through a combination of primitive functional elements of the Kii Cloud SDK for Thing. In fact, the features of the Thing-IF SDK are basically realized by the combination of the features provided by the Kii Cloud SDK for Thing.

You can use the Kii Cloud SDK for Thing, for example, for storing a thing's data in various ways as presented in Hello Thing-IF tutorial. If you store the data measured by a weight scale, shared by your family, as a Thing-IF SDK state, the weight data will be shared among all the owners. By tuning your program so that the data are stored in the scope of each owner, you will be able to satisfy the security requirements.

The Kii Cloud SDK for Thing can co-exist with the Thing-IF SDK. Use the Thing-IF SDK to develop functions that fall within the functional model of the SDK and implement the remaining parts which require tuning with the Kii Cloud SDK for Thing.

Note that the Kii Cloud SDK for Thing here refers to the function for Thing which can be used on the mobile application side and the Thing side. In addition to the functions for Thing covered by the Kii Cloud SDK, it also includes the functions provided by the Thing SDK Embedded and the corresponding REST API.

Combining SDKs

When you are to develop an IoT solution with the Kii Cloud, you have a choice of SDK to use as described in Client SDKs.

As shown in the table on the linked page, you will select the SDK on the basis of the target platform (Android, iOS, or JavaScript) for the mobile application side. For Thing side, you will select either C or Node.js. In both cases, you can directly use the REST API if there is no SDK available for your target platform.

For all platforms, you can choose from the following feature combinations:

  • Using only the features of the Thing-IF SDK

    This is the method presented in Using Thing-IF. If your objectives fit with the SDK's target model, this method will realize your solution most efficiently.

  • Using the features of both the Thing-IF SDK and Kii Cloud SDK for Thing

    This method will allow you to develop your solution mainly with the features provided by the Thing-IF SDK while supplementing the missing features with the Kii Cloud SDK for Thing. You can implement your solution efficiently with some flexibility.

    To combine the features of two SDKs, use the initialization result of the Thing-IF SDK in the Kii Cloud SDK for Thing.

  • Using only the features of the Kii Cloud SDK for Thing

    In this method, you will build the whole solution using only the features provided by the Kii Cloud SDK for Thing without using the Thing-IF SDK. You can choose this option when you are going to build a solution that does not fit with the target model of the Thing-IF SDK.

In this section, we will explain the second and third methods.