Abstract The emerging field of Internet of Things (IoT) offers an unprecedented opportunity for a wide spectrum of applications. However, most applications have been integrating IoT devices through proprietary mechanisms and with closed technology stacks. The monolithic, mostly vendor-specific development architecture leads to soaring customization costs and limited component reusability. It impedes the full-fledged IoT applications in cross-organizational, general-purpose and rapid-changing scenarios. This research intends to provide a coherent architecture that enables interoperable, low-cost and user-customizable IoT rapid prototyping. Under this architecture, each IoT component, either a physical device or a control logic, is abstracted into an independent web service that described by a set of transferable states. By concatenating a valid chain of state transfers between web services, IoT components are further assembled into customizable applications. In this research, a Finite-State-Machine (FSM) model driven architecture is established and a typical implementation of the proposed architecture, i.e. the Hyper Sensor Markup Language (HSML) is provided. We also discuss two practical use cases and related evaluations.