You are tired and comfortably sitting on your couch at your home. You want to have a steamed coffee but there is nobody in the house to make you one. You don’t feel the urge to get up and make a coffee all by yourself. Instead, what you do is switch on the internet and your coffee is ready to be served.

Imagine the above situation coming true!

Three years from now, you are going to experience something similar. Amazed! Yes, this is what Internet of Technology (IoT) is going to do. According to a study done by CISCO, by 2020, more than 50 billion devices are going to be connected with IoT. Business houses are making rapid advances in the technology landscape with such technologies, thus making the workplace adapt to the regulatory requirements and increasing the employee efficiency.

Many household gadgets are constantly being upgraded in order to make them compatible with IoT. Once motion sensors, Wi-Fi adapters, and cameras are embedded in them, they will be completely ready to work.

The Future Is Here

You have already come across the possibilities that IoT can achieve. Now we’ll present some more futuristic things which you can do with
IoT.

Self-parking of vehicles.

Get notification warnings for your phones or any kinds of wearable devices when there are any potential threats to your device.

Automatic progression of fitness levels, tracking health progress and making reports.

The option of ordering groceries and other household items.

While IoT is making news everywhere for its advance future, it’s partnership with web development can result in the creation of something spectacularly different.

PHP And IoT: A Pathbreaking Discovery

Before we move ahead, let us know about PHP and about its working in detail.

PHP is a server-side scripting language used to make dynamic and interactive web pages. It accumulates all the images used in a website and gives the user an immersive experience. The language works smoothly and is best suited for server-side website development services. While executing the code, PHP runtime plays an important role.

While you might be thinking that IoT limits its usage only within devices, but you have not yet discovered the larger picture. In the next few paragraphs, we’re going to unfold the next big discovery which you can witness with the help of PHP and IoT.

A PHP App Using IoT Device

There’s some good news for PHP developers who are interested in developing IoT applications. Do you know that you can make a PHP app by using an IoT device? We’ll be discussing here in brief detail about the various processes that are involved in making such an app.

Things You Need

You need the following things in order to make a PHP app with an IoT app. Take a look at the list below:

Knowledge of PHP.

A local environment for developing PHP with Apache.

Android Studio.

Blue Mix and Google Account.

IDE or text editor.

A Step-By-Step Explanation

To make things easier, we will take you through a step-by-step process.

Step 1: Connect Bluemix with IoT. The easiest way to do this is to create a Bluemix application first and then bind it with the IoT foundation. Once you have done it, login to your Bluemix account, click on ‘Create App’ and then select ‘ web,’ select the Internet of Things Foundation Starter boilerplate and click ‘Create’ in the ‘Create an App’ area.

Step 2: Here, you need to establish a connection between your devices and IoT. Go to the application page and select ‘Internet of Things Foundation Service.’ Doing this isolates your device and its data in a completely separate account. Now, select the ‘Launch Dashboard’ and go follow the steps from ‘creating a device’ to ‘adding a device.’

Step 3: Now install the IoT starter in an android application. In order to this, open Android Studio. Go to ‘Quick Start,’ then select ‘Checkout project from version control’ and choose ‘Git.’ Go to the clone repository dialog now and click on ‘Clone.’ Copy the .apk file from your device and install it with the help of a file manager.

Step 4: This step involves transferring data from Android Starter to IoT. To do this, activate the app which you have installed. There will be a welcome screen, enter the name of the organization with the device identifier and the authentication token. Now, select the ‘Activate sensor’ button. You will start receiving messages different channels of the radio.

Step 5: You need to create an API key for having access to the application in this step. At this stage, you have already got a stream of data which is available in your IoT device. Before that, you need to verify that your application has proper access to IoT. Next, you need to activate the API by the following process:

Activate the IoT Foundation dashboard. Select Access and go to API Keys

Generate an API key

Once you have done this, take the authentication token that has been generated in order to use the values in the following steps.

Step 6: Now, you need to consume the data from IoT with the help of a PHP application. At this stage, the device, as well as the application, can access data from IoT with the help of a messaging protocol called ‘Message Queue Telemetry Transport’ (MQTT). With the help of accelerometer data, you can publish it to the IoT foundation.

Just as in a device, data is published to specific topics, in the same way even an application can consume all the data in the topics. Remember, there are two kinds of topics – cli-app.php and web-app.php. While the first one is useful in running the script at the command line or at the server control; on the other hand, the second one is useful in accessing a script through a web browser.

Wrap Up

The transformation from the analog to the digital world has been characterized by many transformations. It has pushed the world to an advanced place. The successful merger of PHP and IoT will help the 21st-century man to live in a better place.