X-10, Insteon, zwave
Look at misterhouse.
Just some ideas to google for.
Edited to add, also language has not caught up with reality. Anything with house-ish peripherals is called "home automation" even if it is a web interface for out door weather sensors like this article. The relevance is someone looking for automating insteon outputs based on insteon and security system inputs and NTP accurate time using a simple fast and easy to develop scripting language is going to be really unhappy with a very nice looking HTML 5 remote control app like the linked article. Its a cool remote control and a cool graphing system but does apparently no automation at all.
There's about three totally separate markets all called "home automation". There's web page (or sometimes more annoyingly iphone-only app, or app that wants access to my contacts list for spam and resale purposes, etc) remote controlling. There's logging and graphing. Finally there's automation as in remotely controlled devices automatically taking action based on other remote devices or rather elaborate multiple timers or the wall clock time. Also there tends to be issues with the balance of input vs output in that this article does virtually no output at all other than nice looking web pages, compared to other tools in the field. Finally there's the open/closed issue mentioned where in home automation, as in actual automation, closed "solutions" are utterly useless due to the network effect between devices. The usefulness of any individual "home automation" device scales at least quadratically with the number of other devices it can interact with. For example, a web interface to my thermostat would be pretty useless by itself, if it can't network with everything else I own, or worse, anything else I own.