Chapter 1. Introduction

XCoffee was not what the designers of the Internet had in mind when they connected computers at research sites across the United States under the auspice of DARPA. Nor was it an expected application when the nuclear scientists at CERN invented the Web to facilitate information sharing. XCoffee refers to a video frame-grabber, installed in 1991, that is connected to a camera focused on a coffee machine in the Trojan Room at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge in England. Its installation had a very simple motivation. The Laboratory had a coffee club that shared the use of the coffee machine. Club members often negotiated several flights of stairs only to find the coffee pot empty. Frustrated, a couple of club members rigged up a system—including the camera, the frame-grabber, a client program, and a server program—in a day or two so that, with XCoffee, Cambridge students and faculty members could check, from the convenience of their computers, whether there was enough coffee or whether a new pot needed to be brewed. Eventually, everyone with access to the Web, from anywhere in the world, could view the status of the coffee pot (http://www.parkerinfo.com/coffee.htm). At the time, XCoffee was viewed with more amusement than understanding, but it served as a good indicator of what was to come.

In this chapter, we briefly trace the trend in Internet technology that led to the vision and opportunity of a networked home. We describe the service gateway as the functional nucleus in such an environment, depict the challenges facing software vendors trying to enter this market, explain the pioneering work of the Java Embedded Server™ product, and introduce the Java™ technology-based solution specified by the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) for developing and deploying services for the home.