Details
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Improvement
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Status: Open
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Critical
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
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Description
There's been more than one example of someone who after hearing and/or reading some about Edgent says "I still don't know what Edgent is".
We need to improve the messages on our Website landing page, doc website, and probably Apache project page to more clearly get our message across.
After further explanation of a sample, you can get:
"oh it's an SDK"
"oh... you're not running the topology, you're building it, then running it"
... but still...
It's tied to Android?
It's tied to Watson IoT Platform?
It has an API for accessing sensors?
Yeah, the the doc has content that addresses most of that. It's apparently not as effective as it needs to be.
IMO, a phrase that we use in a few locations "Edgent is a programming model and micro-service style runtime ..." seems to be the first place to start. Perhaps something like this would be better: Edgent is an SDK for creating event driven stream processing style analytic applications to embed in small footprint edge devices and IoT gateways. Smarter Edgent-based devices and gateways can do realtime analytics on continuous streams of data, ...." you get the idea.
The website landing page also has wording that says Edgent (doesn't say an Edgent based application) performs realtime analytics, makes devices more intelligent, Edgent can adjust controls..., Edgent enables connected devices, etc. Very misleading IMO.
On the Documentation site landing page, it talks mostly (only?) in terms of reducing data. Nothing about how a smarter device (edge resident analytics) can make devices more autonomous: reduce decision making / action latency and overall be more autonomous while disconnected from the cloud.