A lot of people are getting interested in IoT - there's big money coming, apparently, and just about everybody is going to get hired - but it's not always the easiest thing to get started with. That's where the Eclipse Foundation's announcement from JavaOne comes in: the Internet of Things is now quite a bit more Java-friendly.

(via iot.eclipse.org)

This isn't a single standard to tie everything together - that's unlikely. Instead it's a stack to support three of the major IoT standards: MQTT, CoAP, and Lightweight M2M standards. Steven Lawson at IDG News Service describes the release as follows:

The stack includes implementations of three standards, coming from different projects within Eclipse: Paho, already being used by IBM, is a Java implementation of the client for MQTT, a widely used machine-to-machine connectivity protocol, and Moquette is a Java-based MQTT broker. The Californium project implements CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol), a Web transfer protocol from the Internet Engineering Task Force. Another project, Leshan, brings a Java implementation of Lightweight M2M, an Open Mobile Alliance interface between IoT clients and servers.

And given the prevalence and popularity of Java, the Open Stack for IoT should bring a lot more developers to IoT. If you're interested in first steps as far as Java and IoT go, the Eclipse Foundation's Ian Skerrett has already written up a few suggestions.

Or, if you just want to dive in and see what it's all about, check out iot.eclipse.org and see if you can start automating your home, or whatever else you might want to do. In Java, though.