The broad variety of topics covered under the umbrella of ubiquitous computing led the research community to a fragmentation of the methods and tools used to achieve their goals. By contrast we believe that different goals do not necessarily mean different approaches. Since five years ago, we have been proponents of a unified approach based on the distributed object abstraction which allows synergies to be better exploited. Remote device management, wireless sensor and actuator networks, hardware components and now even reconfigurable hardware platforms and service platforms are considered as part of a large evolving system sharing a common middleware and a single design methodology. Considerable effort was put into the design of basic services to allow autonomous implementations on the smallest micro-controllers in the market.