umqtt.simple: Add README.

Author: Paul Sokolovsky

umqtt.simple/README.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,87 @@
+umqtt.simple
+============
+
+umqtt is a simple MQTT client for MicroPython. (Note that it uses some
+MicroPython shortcuts and doesn't work with CPython).
+
+Design requirements
+-------------------
+
+* Memory efficiency.
+* Avoid infamous design anti-patterns like "callback hell".
+* Support for both publishing and subscription via a single client
+  object (another alternative would be to have separate client classes
+  for publishing and subscription).
+
+API design
+----------
+
+Based on the requirements above, there are following API traits:
+
+* All data related to MQTT messages is encoded as bytes. This includes
+  both message content AND topic names (even though MQTT spec states
+  that topic name is UTF-8 encoded). The reason for this is simple:
+  what is received over network socket is binary data (bytes) and
+  it would require extra step to convert that to a string, spending
+  memory on that. Note that this applies only to topic names (because
+  they can be both sent and received). Other parameters specified by
+  MQTT as UTF-8 encoded (e.g. ClientID) are accepted as strings.
+* Subscribed messages are delivered via a callback. This is to avoid
+  using a queue for subscribed messages, as otherwise they may be
+  received at any time (including when client expects other type
+  of server response, so there're 2 choices: either deliver them
+  immediately via a callback or queue up until an "expected" response
+  arrives). Note that lack of need for a queue is delusive: the
+  runtime call stack forms an implicit queue in this case. And unlike
+  explicit queue, it's much harder to control. This design was chosen
+  because in a common case of processing subscribed messages it's
+  the most efficient. However, if in subscription callback, new
+  messages of QoS>0 are published, this may lead to deep, or
+  infinite recursion (the latter means an application will terminate
+  with ``RuntimeException``).
+
+API reference
+-------------
+
+Taking into account API traits described above, umqtt pretty closely
+follows MQTT control operations, and maps them to class methods:
+
+* ``connect()`` - Connect to a server.
+* ``disconnect()`` - Disconnect from a server, release resources.
+* ``ping()`` - Ping server (response is processed automatically by wait_msg()).
+* ``publish()`` - Publish a message.
+* ``subscribe()`` - Subscribe to a topic.
+* ``set_callback()`` - Set callback for received subscription messages.
+* ``wait_msg()`` - Wait for a server message. A subscription message will be
+  delivered to a callback set with set_callback(), any other messages
+  will be processed internally.
+* ``check_msg()`` - Check if there's pending message from server. If yes,
+  process the same way as wait_msg(), if not, return immediately.
+
+``wait_msg()`` and ``check_msg()`` are "main loop iteration" methods, blocking
+and non-blocking version. They should be called periodically in a loop,
+``wait_msg()`` if you don't have any other foreground tasks to perform
+(i.e. your app just reacts to subscribed MQTT messages), ``check_msg()``
+if you process other foreground tasks too.
+
+Note that you don't need to call ``wait_msg()``/``check_msg()`` if you only
+publish messages, never subscribe to them.
+
+For more detailed information about API please see the source code
+(which is quite short and easy to review) and provided examples.
+
+
+Supported MQTT features
+-----------------------
+
+QoS 0 and 1 are supported for both publish and subscribe. QoS2 isn't
+supported to keep code size small. Besides ClientID, only "clean
+session" parameter is supported for connect as of now.
+
+
+MQTT client with automatic reconnect
+------------------------------------
+
+There's a separate `umqtt.robust` module which builds on `umqtt.simple`
+and adds automatic reconnect support in case of network errors.
+Please see its documentation for further details.