Ubicomp presents a rather arduous requirement of robustness, reliability and availability to the end user. No single researcher has the time or desire to develop all portions of a ubicomp application and be confident that it will satisfy that requirement on the variety of devices that a user will want. The only hope is to rely on third-party software, which leaves the challenge of gluing together pieces of a system, or component integration. Though there is a wealth of academic research and commercial products that provide very general component integration technologies, they are not appropriate for ubicomp application development. This is because those integration technologies are not universally available on the range of devices and operating systems that are required.
Our requirement for component integration is a some standard method for communication and control that can be realized across the wide array of devices and operating systems. One strategy would be to adopt TCP, as it provides a lowest common denominator for communications for a large array of devices. At a higher level, a lightweight communications protocol as HTTP is desirable. HTTP servers are available in any language you desire and are simple enough to run on the limited resources of most embedded devices. Most HTTP servers now also support the extensible standard markup language XML. XML is a text-based protocol, so it will again be supportable for a wide variety of devices. While there may ultimately be limitations to this lightweight approach to component integration, it is sufficient at present to support the ad hoc integration that is required for rapid prototyping of ubicomp applications.