Methods for Monitoring and Controlling IoT Devices with Laravel

The Laravel framework was created for building web applications, thus using the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) protocol. This article presents an empirical, comparative analysis of the existing methods for controlling and monitoring IoT (Internet of Things) devices using the PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) Laravel framework. In the following text we will present REST (Representational State Transfer) API (Application Programming Interface) with HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) Requests. IoT devices send data and receive commands through HTTP requests to a Laravel API. Then we will present Laravel Echo and Laravel Reverb for bidirectional and real-time transmission of information between the IoT devices and the web browser. We will address Laravel and MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport). With these technologies, the devices send/receive data from/to an MQTT broker, and Laravel subscribes to read the data or to send commands. Finally, we will present Database Polling. Devices send data to Laravel directly to the database through HTTP requests, and the frontend frequently checks the status of the database. Each of the methods listed above has its advantages and disadvantages. They will be described briefly, and at the end we drew conclusions based on a comparison in which we will consider the following elements: whether the method allows real-time communication, the complexity of the method, its efficiency, ease of implementation, scalability, costs and the recommended domain of applicability.