The Battle of Midware moves into your home

• Tags:
• Microsoft,
• Ws-discovery,
• Home Control,
• Upnp

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 06 May 2004 15:00 BST

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Middleware, like middle age and mid-order batsmen, has the unshakeable aura of worthy dullness about it. Like the glue that held the WWII Mosquito wooden bomber aircraft together, it's of prime importance and takes immense ingenuity to produce, yet gets none of the limelight when things go well. If stuff comes unstuck at the seams, though, middleware is the first to get the blame.

All of this is old hat to the army of managers, designers and coders who rely on middleware for commercial transaction processing, database integration, Web service production and the rest of the panoply of modern business IT. But middleware is poised to move out of the office and into the home, becoming not so much the glue that holds the plane together as the strategic mainstay for the next global battle -- for your home.

That's the reason Bill Gates got up on stage at the recent Windows Hardware Engineering Conference and announced the Devices Profile for Web Services specification . This sets out some middleware standards through which the Babel of non-PC devices in your home and office can communicate and control each other. They can also link to your computer and, of course, the jolly old Internet: the vision of a smart house is almost here. Reliably, Microsoft is promoting this as a spiffy new idea born of much cleverness and ideal for its idea of having one big Microsoft box in the basement running your entire digital and media life via MS-enabled gizmos everywhere; just as reliably, that's not the whole story.

That vision is the best part of 50 years old by now, and has roots going back even further. Hobbyists and architects building show homes have been wiring up the place with a wide variety of ingenious devices ever since then -- there have even been standards, such as X-10, which had a chance of widespread non-technical acceptance. But nothing could wean consumer-electronics manufacturers away from proprietary systems and closed architectures -- and when the whole idea is to link lots of different things together, that's a reliably fatal poison.

Computer people were wiser to the ideas of interoperability and the invention of Tuplespace in the early 80s set the scene for most of the current work on interoperable smart devices. The idea here, first described in a programming language called Linda, is that devices send blocks of data, called tuples, into a shared space where other devices can read them. Devices can ask the space manager -- also called a broker -- for tuples with data that matches things they're interested in, or they can be told when information arrives.

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