An IDE for Visual Programming of Smart Automations in the Internet of Things
2021-11-14, 13:30–14:00, Room 2

The Internet of Things introduced pervasive deployment in the environment of a variety of network connected smart objects. In this context, people’s daily lives could benefit by taking advantage of the smart objects that will be available through an environment of automations on their everyday activities. In fact, however, the demands for such automations are so highly personalized, fluid and they are typically small-scale micro applications. As result, such automations create a niche-market with unlike industrial interest. Our work focuses on providing non-programmers with appropriate tools to empower them develop their smart automations efficiently. In particular, we have developed an IDE for visual programming with a full-scale end-user development toolset for the programming of smart automations.


Thanks to IoT era, personal smart devices and services are available in the environment and potentially everybody would like to create micro applications for their daily activities. The vehicle for this goal is the visual programming workspace environment. However, there are several challenges that have to be addressed to achieve this goal. In this context, we have developed an IDE for visual programming that provides a full-scale end-user development toolset by including:

• Management for the smart devices in the context of EUD including user actions to authenticate, organize, customize smart devices in order to enable isolation and handling of the numerous existing smart devices.

• Workspace environment for personalized internet of things automations including conditional and scheduled tasks and choice of starts them automatically or manually during the project execution.

• Appropriate GUI for the runtime environment that cares for monitoring and interacting with smart automations, facilitating the end-user developers by removing the requirement to program user interfaces for their smart automations.

• Facilities in the context of testing and debugging the smart automations by developing infrastructure to enable the users to simulate the smart devices, the behavior of the smart devices, the date and the time that the automations will be executed.

• Infrastructure for responding to the arising user questions about automations which caused during the execution of the constructed IoT applications.

For more details see the IDE in repository: https://github.com/jvalsam/Blockly-Studio

See also: presentation

Yannis Valsamakis has received his PhD in May 2021 from Computer Science Department, University of Crete. His research interests are in visual programming languages and tools. He is working as a senior full-stack developer in learning platforms.
For more details see https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannis-valsamakis-phd-315b9a76/.