What BLE gateway APIs do you need?

[bradjc]

To guide what gateway infrastructure we need, it might be useful to start with what APIs we would like to be able to use at the application layer. These APIs would likely be the top layer in a cloudcomm-like system, where the running application offloads data to a gateway subsystem. That gateway library ("gwlib") would then likely store the data until it can offload it to a gateway, which would then forward the data on somehow. Now, there are quite a few different designs that could work here.

Some thoughts:

1. Something simple

Setup a URL at boot and then just write data. The endpoint at the given URL will get HTTP posts with the data.

void gwlib_init (char* url);
void gwlib_write (uint8_t* buf, uint32_t len);

2. More like files:

This makes gwlib also capable of storing the data. Each create() creates a "file" which can then be removed after it is offloaded or kept until delete() is called.

void gwlib_init (char* url);
int gwlib_create (uint8_t* buf, uint32_t len, bool persistent);
void gwlib_delete (int file);

3. The HTTP option

Instead of a log-type abstraction, what about an HTTP-like abstraction? This would let the app issue HTTP POSTs that, when a gateway was in contact, would be issued by the gateway, with a callback being called when the POST completed. This provides a lot more flexibility, but does change the abstraction.

void gwlib_post (char* url, uint8_t* buf, uint32_t len, post_callback_f callback);

Others?

There are many possibilities for this, and these are certainly not all of them. What would be most useful for you?