HOME API

In the early days of writing this book we devoted a complete chapter to a working group called Home API, which was defining and developing software infrastructures for in-home appliances. Toward the end of 1999, Home API announced that it had decided to merge its efforts with those of the UPnP forum to ensure a unified specification for development of home-control, software, and products. Consequently we removed our Home API chapter and decided instead to include a new section in the UPnP chapter to briefly describe the group's background and achievements.

The founding members of the Home API Working Group were Compaq, Honeywell, Intel, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, and Philips.

The final result of the group's work, the Home API Specification and Software Development Kit (SDK), was targeted at independent software and hardware vendors that develop software or hardware for home PCs and controllable home devices. The specification was a set of programming interfaces that enabled software applications to discover and control home devices such as TVs, VCRs, set-top boxes, lights, security systems, and thermostats. The initial release of Home API included support for a variety of existing home networks, devices, and control protocols, and it was easily extensible to support others as well.

Home API supported multiple home-networks and was designed to allow application programmers to access home devices in a protocol-independent manner. By shielding applications from the underlying heterogeneity of home networks and providing standard APIs for controlling home devices, Home API helped get applications that use home devices developed quickly and easily. Home API allowed applications control and query the status of home devices. For example, an application could use Home API to query the current temperature of an outside thermometer or change the channel on a television. Home API did not support data streaming such as sending a video stream from a PC to a digital VCR. Other APIs would be used in conjunction with Home API for that purpose.