Tokyo, Japan, 26 April 2018 − ACCESS CO., LTD today announced that its Elixir-based web application framework developed in-house will be released as the OSS named Antikythera Framework™ to the development community on April 27, 2018 for the purpose of stimulating development of IoT services.

The key to develop and provide IoT-based services is the embedding of web technologies in a whole range of devices and services. The Antikythera Framework is a web application framework built on Elixir*, a functional programming language with parallel processing capabilities. The framework provides the following functions important for IoT services:

• Asynchronous job execution
• Parallel processing to make full use of multi-cores
• Non-stop software updates without service interruption
• Multi-service/Multi-tenant support.

The Antikythera Framework leverages ACCESS’s experience in developing and providing IoT services for more than 8 million devices, including its web application servers used by ACCESS ConnectTM, the company’s IoT service development platform. The framework can help reduce the effort of developing web applications, as well as reducing time to market.

The Antikythera Framework offers the following features.

• As a platform for multiple services:
  • Resource control for multi-tenant use cases
  • Automated deployment of new services without affecting other running services
  • Built-in logging, monitoring and configuration management
  • Service-to-service communications without network overhead

• As a web application framework:
  • HTTP request processing with arbitrarily assigned Elixir code
  • Subdomain-based routing for multiple services, and path-based routing for single services
  • CDN support for static content, and HTML template support for dynamic web pages
• As an asynchronous job execution environment:
  • Built-in distributed job queues
  • Running arbitrary Elixir code for each job

Over recent years, web service development has generally adopted microservice design methodology to enable cooperative operation of programs distributed across multiple servers according to function. Unfortunately, this often increases the management costs of infrastructure providing microservices. Until now, there has been no framework able to cope with this challenge. As IoT services expand going forward, the number of managed devices is expected to increase explosively while deployed services diversify. Management of such a large number of devices therefore requires a framework capable of hosting diversified services in a consistent manner. Taking advantage of the features of the Erlang** language used as the runtime system for Elixir, the Antikythera Framework solves this issue by providing an environment that enables parallel operation of multiple microservices.

Michi Uematsu, Chief Technology Officer at ACCESS, commented:
“At ACCESS, we believe the Elixir web application framework is an effective choice for developing next-generation web services on PaaS and BaaS platforms. This is why we made the decision to release Antikythera Framework, a framework we have developed, as open source software. The Antikythera Framework is the first Elixir web application framework to provide PaaS/BaaS functions for easy handling of large numbers of devices, such as non-stop automatic deployment, multi-tenant facilitation for web services, built-in distributed job queues, logging and monitoring. We are extremely pleased to be able to contribute to the Elixir development community with this release.”

The distribution license is Apache version 2.0.

The Antikythera Framework OSS can be downloaded here: https://github.com/access-company/antikythera

* Elixir is a functional programming language with parallel processing capabilities that runs on the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM).
** Erlang is an open source computer programming language for parallel processing that was released in 1998 by Ericsson, Sweden’s telecommunications device manufacturer.

About ACCESS
Since 1984, ACCESS CO., LTD. (Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers Index, 4813) has provided advanced IT solutions centered around mobile and network software technologies to telecom carriers, consumer electronics manufacturers, broadcasting and publishing companies, the automotive industry and energy infrastructure providers around the world. The company develops mobile software solutions that have been installed on over 1.5 billion devices, and network software solutions that have been used by over 300 telecommunication equipment manufacturers. Utilizing its network virtualization technology skills and knowledge, the company is currently focusing on the development and commercialization of Internet of Things (IoT) and media solutions that combine embedded and cloud technology. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, the company operates subsidiaries and affiliates in Asia, Europe and the United States to support and expand its business globally. Learn more about ACCESS at www.access-company.com.

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