Although Place is an interface implemented by service objects, not service UIs, Place 's motivation is user interface. Place is an attempt to define a simple, overarching user-interface metaphor for the emerging new computer. Jini's view of the world is that everything on the network is a service represented by a mobile service object. Place provides a way in which service providers and users can organize the user's relationship to those objects. To do something on the network, a user would go to a place and use an object.
Every object has an intrinsic class, which defines the types of services it offers.
Users organize objects by placing links to those objects in places. Therefore, in this proposed user-interface metaphor, the fundamental abstraction with which human users interact with services on the network is the object. This contrasts with the fundamental abstractions of the desktop and hypertext Web. For the desktop, the fundamental abstractions are the application and the document. For the hypertext Web, the fundamental abstraction is the page, which is really a kind of document.