Eclipse Ditto is an open-source framework for building digital twins in the IoT. It lets you represent physical devices – sensors, machines, vehicles, and more – as JSON-based “Things” that your applications interact with through standard web APIs.
What is it?
Ditto mirrors real-world devices as virtual “Things” in the cloud. Each Thing holds the device’s last-known state, its metadata, and a policy that controls who can read or write its data.
Your applications never need to know how a device connects or which protocol it speaks. You work with a Thing the same way you work with any web resource: through REST-style APIs.
What is it not?
Ditto is not an end-to-end IoT platform. It does not:
- Run software on gateways or edge devices
- Define or implement a device communication protocol
- Prescribe the data structure a device must use
Ditto focuses on the backend layer. It assumes your devices are already connected to the internet (for example via Eclipse Hono) and provides web APIs so your applications can work with those devices as digital twins.
When to use it?
Consider a typical IoT solution. You have hardware (sensors, actuators) and software (mobile apps, dashboards, backend services). The backend is responsible for:
- Providing an API that abstracts away hardware details
- Routing requests between devices and applications
- Enforcing authorization so that each user or service accesses only the data it should
- Caching device state so applications can read data even when a device is offline
- Notifying interested parties when device state changes
Ditto handles all of these responsibilities out of the box.