International Business Machines Corporation

Falk Posch

Carsten Leue

Stefan Behl

The present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for efficiently serializing navigational state into URLs or the header of the new portal page by using a complete stream-based serialization. The inventive serialization is divided into two sub-processes which are both stream-based. The first stream-based serialization sub-process which is hierarchy-oriented uses the hierarchical object representation of the navigational state and transforms it into a series of events. The events serve as the input for various strategies for compacting information that is associated with these events. At the end of the sub-process the compacted navigational state information carried by the received events is transformed into a character-based representation and the hierarchical structure of the navigational state is derived from the order of the received events and transformed into an additional character-based representation both being directly streamed to the second sub-process. The second stream-based serialization sub-process which is hierarchy-independent uses the result of the first sub-process and applies further compression and character encoding strategies and finally streams the compressed and character encoded information into a URL or header of said new Portal page. Both sub-processes are seamlessly linked together. The inventive stream-based serialization method is efficient because it minimizes the overall processing time needed to generate a URL and also effective because it makes sure that the serialization result is as short as possible to meet the requirements regarding URL length and markup size.

Method, system, and computer program product for efficiently serializing navigational state in a portal

The present invention provides a method and system for efficiently handling navigational state by separating the latest navigational state into a base navigational state part and a delta navigational state part. The base navigational state which describes that part of the latest navigational state that is identical across all URLs is encoded in the header of the page markup to be submitted to the client's browser. The delta navigational part that describes the semantics of that specific URL is encoded in its associated URL. Each user interaction using such URL causes the browser to submit the base part as well as the delta part. On the server side the base and delta part are being merged resulting in new navigation state serving as a base for the rendering of the new page. The navigational state is represented as a hierarchical tree-like structure that can be serialized efficiently and compressed by prior art compression techniques. The hierarchical tree-like structure is based on a well-defined state model that is optimized in terms of state serialization. The state model arranges the contained navigational state information in character based information. That saves processing time as it avoids type conversion of navigational information. In addition the present invention includes further strategies to reduce the amount of information that must be serialized.

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Hildrizhausen, Germany

Falk Posch