Gateways

An application-gateway is a device (node) that acts as a “gate” between two networks. Today service developers are facing many problems when building custom services, distributed to a huge number of clients. Firstly, they need to master several different technologies and go through framework specific APIs. Secondly, applications developed for one framework will not work in another framework and thirdly, the data collected and the actions provided by devices needs to be mapped to the service model.

IEP’s application gateways provides a convenient solution for service developers to access several services and protocols. Gateways are an important future development part for the IE platform to ‘connect’ services like IPFS (Interplanetary Filesystem), used for decentralized storage, ZERONET, used for decentralized hosting and Tendermint, used for side- and private chains solutions.

Since gateways are running within core-scope services can directly interact with IEP’s blockchain and transaction models. When a client program establishes a connection to a destination service, it connects to the IEP application gateway. The client then negotiates with the node in order to communicate with the destination service. In effect, the client establishes the connection with the destination and acts on behalf of the client. Due to it’s transparent API access, if configured, gateways are reachable from within IEP’s smart wallet.

This expands the wallet feature set greatly. Gateways can be used for public or private services.