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#5924 The Haxall Initiative - SkyFoundry Open Sources Core Software to Accelerate the BIoT

John Petze – Mon 7 Jun 2021

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SkyFoundry has formally announced the release of Haxall, our new initiative that open sources many of SkySpark’s core software modules. We are open sourcing these proven software components will streamline development and reduce the cost of creating IoT devices for the built environment (BIoT). We believe this will directly help to accelerate the transition to data-driven, intelligent buildings.

To read Haxall Press Release click here

What Is Haxall

Haxall is an open-source software framework designed to streamline the process of building IoT data products—both hardware and software. It includes a core subset of proven SkyFoundry code that addresses critical functions needed to connect to devices and equipment systems, normalizes their data, and makes it openly available in a standardized format to other value-added applications.

The Haxall Framework streamlines the onboarding of data into value-added applications by providing the software functions to communicate with external devices, capture semantic tagging at the edge and communicate with external applications. It is powerful enough to run applications at the edge or use it as an edge gateway to integrate on-site IoT data up to the cloud.

What Does Haxall Include?

Full Haystack 4 support. Haxall is bundled with SkySpark®'s full suite of Haystack APIs. This includes a rich set of APIs to model, encode, and query data using the Haystack 4 ontology.

Folio. SkySpark's revolutionary Folio database technology is at the heart of the Haxall platform. Folio is built 100% around the Project Haystack data modeling standard. Everything is stored as native Haystack dicts and queried using Haystack filters. Folio provides seamless integration with persistent and transient real-time tags making it a truly unique design to build IoT applications.

Axon. Haxall includes the Axon functional scripting engine. Create scripts to onboard, query, and transform your Haystack data using a rich library of hundreds of functions. The Axon function library has been leveraged for more than a decade to streamline working with Haystack data.

Haxall Daemon. A complete runtime called the "Haxall Daemon" is provided to quickly get your IoT applications up and running. The Haxall Daemon comes with "batteries included": tools to create new databases, built-in user management and authentication, a webserver with full support for the Haystack HTTP API, dynamic module management, and an Axon shell for remote management. In addition, Haxall provides runtime support for both the Java VM and JavaScript environments

Connectors. Haxall includes a connector framework to acquire data from external devices and normalize diverse IoT protocols into the Haxall ecosystem. A suite of ready-to-use connectors is provided as open source including Haystack HTTP API, MQTT, Modbus, oBIX, SQL, and Sedona Sox. An in-memory trending engine is included to historize connector data into time-series data. Haxall also includes an Arcbeam™ module that provides seamless connection of Haxall devices into SkyFoundry’s SkySpark software.

How Haxall Helps Accelerate the BIoT

Haxall streamlines development and reduces the cost of building IoT data acquisition devices by providing proven software components needed to build IoT edge data acquisition solutions. Haxall is available as open source under the widely adopted Academic Free License ("AFL") v. 3.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/AFL-3.0.

Haxall Is Available Now The code for the Haxall software modules shown below are available now on GitHub

  • haystack: Core Haystack APIs
  • def: Namespace implementation
  • defc: Definition compiler
  • axon: Scripting language engine
  • folio: Database APIs
  • hxStore: Haxall implementation of the file storage engine
  • hxFolio: Haxall implementation of the Folio database

SkyFoundry is excited to contribute this proven software technology to the industry and we look forward to continuing to advance the adoption of the IoT in the built environment.