Subject: [core] CoRE Tools

From: John Carter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 11:46:49 +1200

Alas, the exceedingly useful and friendly firefox add-on "Cu" has gone
unmaintained and no longer works.

It was pretty much the "face" of coap in terms of demonstrating the concept
and convincing non-technical people.

Are there any other user friendly / cross platform tools that speak CoAP
and or any of the other CoRE technologies?

Thanks!

-- 
John Carter
Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics
PO Box 1645 Christchurch
New Zealand

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2018 20:02:31 -0400

On Jul 18, 2018, at 19:46, John Carter <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Alas, the exceedingly useful and friendly firefox add-on “Cu" has gone unmaintained

Actually, not quite.

> and no longer works.

That one, sadly, is true.  When Mozilla was recently renovated, the extension APIs were overhauled, too, and the one Copper relies on to do UDP communications went by the wayside.

> It was pretty much the “face" of coap in terms of demonstrating the concept and convincing non-technical people.

Indeed.

> Are there any other user friendly / cross platform tools that speak CoAP and or any of the other CoRE technologies?

You can install an old version of Firefox just for Copper.
There is also a port for Chrome, but that is not quite as friendly as the Firefox Copper was/is.

Grüße, Carsten

---

From: John Carter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 12:07:48 +1200

> Actually, not quite.

Is there a more recent version of the source somewhere then? The versions
on github I have found were last touched in 2016.

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 12:02 PM, Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]> wrote:

> That one, sadly, is true.  When Mozilla was recently renovated, the
> extension APIs were overhauled, too, and the one Copper relies on to do UDP
> communications went by the wayside.
>
> > It was pretty much the “face" of coap in terms of demonstrating the
> concept and convincing non-technical people.
>
> Indeed.
>

-- 
John Carter
Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics
PO Box 1645 Christchurch
New Zealand

---

From: Stuart Longland <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 21:37:27 +1000

> There is also a port for Chrome, but that is not quite as friendly as the Firefox Copper was/is.

I too was a bit miffed when I updated Firefox and lost Copper… actually
the latest update has had me wondering why I don't switch to Chromium.
(Guess old habits die hard… I was a Netscape user for a long time.)

But, no use lamenting over that.  Two downsides with Copper though:

1. it didn't do scoped addresses (e.g. ff02::1%wpan0; fe80::c0:fffe:1%eth0)
2. to my knowledge it didn't support encodings such as CBOR.

The latter point made it difficult to work with the CoMI implementation
I've been working on (although to be truthful, it's probably only a
partial CoMI implementation, and likely lots of things I got wrong).

I'd cook something up in Python, but haven't run across a CoAP library
I'm happy with yet.  (Tried coapthon and txthings, coapthon didn't work
well at all, and txthings has problems with IPv6 multicast.)

There's NodeJS libraries that work well for CoAP/CBOR, not sure if these
would work with Electron or other NodeJS/Webkit UI toolkits.  Then
again, having something that runs as a daemon and you hit with a web
browser could work well for certain things (lots of Raspberry Pi-based
6LoWPAN gateways out there, e.g. OpenThread Border Router).

Postman has some good ideas regarding HTTP that'd be worth "borrowing"
which could help in debugging other protocols like block transfers, CoMI
and others.

I haven't heard of alternatives to Copper, it was by far the best UI
I've seen for dealing with CoAP.  If people know of others, I'm all
ears, otherwise though, maybe it's time to roll the sleeves up and DIY.

Regards,
-- 
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