The Internet of Coffee
There is coffee all over the world. Increasingly, in a world in which computing is ubiquitous, the computists want to make coffee. Coffee brewing is an art, but the distributed intelligence of the web-connected world transcends art. Thus, there is a strong, dark, rich requirement for a protocol designed espressoly for the brewing of coffee.
Back in 1998, the Elders of the Internet created the Hypertext Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) to allow remote-controlled coffee-brewing over the internet. It’s a special protocol built on top of HTTP to send requests specifically to coffee pots. Coffee pots that implement the protocol will respond to BREW requests, which contain a message either to “start” or “stop” brewing.
In their wisdom, the Elders of the Internet foresaw a future where networked coffee pots can add fixins to your coffee automatically. They included an “accept-additions” header field where you can specify what kind of milk, sweetener, syrup, spice, or alcohol you would like added to your cup of joe and a WHEN method for when you want to “say when”.
HTCPCP supports 29 languages, including Azerbaijani, Basque, and Esperanto. Strangely, it doesn’t support Turkish (though Friend Chris tells me that Greek coffee is the same thing, so you can just use the supported Greek). Additionally, HTCPCP does not support brewing decaf, because, “What’s the point?”
In case you accidentally send an HTCPCP request to a teapot, you will receive the “418 I’m a teapot” error code. It is likely that the entity you’re trying to reach is short and stout.
The Elders promised another memo to discuss access authentication, which would protect users from “denial of coffee service” attacks caused by unmoderated access to unprotected coffee pots. That memo never got written because this was all an April Fool’s joke.
