IoT agents are responsible for receiving messages from physical devices (directly or through a gateway) and sending them commands in order to configure them. This iotagent-json, in particular, receives messages via MQTT with JSON payloads.
iotagent-json depends on two things: a Kafka broker, so that it can receive messages informing it about new devices (and, in extension, about their updates and removals), and a MQTT broker, so that it can receive messages from the devices. It waits for messages sent through these two elements: from the device manager with a management operation on a device and from the MQTT broker with a message sent by a device.
As this is a npm-based project, building it is as simple as
npm install
npm run-script build
If everything runs fine, the generated code should be in ./build
folder.
As simple as:
npm run-script start ./config.json
Remember that you should already have a Kafka node (with a zookeeper instance) and a MQTT broker (such as Eclipse Mosquitto)
Simply put: you won't. In fact you can implement a simple Kafka publisher to emulate the behaviour of a device manager instance and a listener to check what messages it is generating. But it seems easier to get the real components - they are not that hard to start and to use (given that you use dojot's docker-compose). Check also DeviceManager documentation for further information about how to create a new device.