The great thing about HTTP outside of just being well known and available everywhere for developers is that you can use it to negotiate switches to other completely different protocols, or change content types, as necessary. This doesn't do much to help truly resource constrained environments but honestly as power and performance get cheaper, I think most consumer usecases can spare the cycles.
The machine the gateway is running on can also be extended to use your solution of choice, for example ZWave with an ESP8266[0][1].
You can also bring your ble/lora/zigbee device-gateway solution with you and have that thing talk to the WebThings Gateway as well, acting as a proxy if necessary.
IMO it doesn't get much better than this -- the ship to have one true communication standard (tm) has already sailed if it was ever even possible, so we're going to have to paper over them if we want devices to interoperate -- whatever does the papering is probably going to be more powerful than the devices themselves, and HTTP has proven to be a pretty easy to grasp and flexible enough interface over them.
All that said, in the lighter-than-http pile of technologies there's also CoAP[2] which I learned about recently that is pretty cool.
And we all know some clown will hook up a nuclear launch system to it so the good General can connect via his home WiFi. And the doctor a hospital life support system to "stay informed" at his cabin...
For sure I applaud this and will play with it. And hope my cynicism is misplaced.
The machine the gateway is running on can also be extended to use your solution of choice, for example ZWave with an ESP8266[0][1].
You can also bring your ble/lora/zigbee device-gateway solution with you and have that thing talk to the WebThings Gateway as well, acting as a proxy if necessary.
IMO it doesn't get much better than this -- the ship to have one true communication standard (tm) has already sailed if it was ever even possible, so we're going to have to paper over them if we want devices to interoperate -- whatever does the papering is probably going to be more powerful than the devices themselves, and HTTP has proven to be a pretty easy to grasp and flexible enough interface over them.
All that said, in the lighter-than-http pile of technologies there's also CoAP[2] which I learned about recently that is pretty cool.
[0]: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/zwave-adapter
[1]: https://www.instructables.com/id/Mozilla-IoT-Gateway-With-ES...
[2]: http://coap.technology