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This article focuses on the Obje Interoperability Framework, a middleware technology, developed by a research group at the Palo Alto Research Center in California. The technology lets networked applications and services coordinate with each other--even when they know almost nothing about one another. In 2005, developers must program devices to recognize the specific protocols, standards, data formats, and operations of all the peer device types they expect their devices to encounter. The balance of work in this model is fundamentally wrong. If one new device type appears on the network, developers must update all existing devices. The Obje infrastructure uses recombinant computing to let devices interact without previous approaches' limitations and strictures. Recombinant computing recognizes that communication between any two parties is predicated in shared knowledge about the terms of communication. The developers of Obje moved away the profile-oriented model and instead used a few simple abstractions that remain constant and that they assume all peers on the network understand. Obje, for example, represents only four major classes of device capabilities. A device can: connect to another device; provide metadata about itself; be controlled; and provide references to other devices.