Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Ori Amiga

Dharma Kiritkumar Shukla

Junfeng Zhang

John MacIntyre

Aditya G Bhandarkar

Justin Grant

Robert J Levy

Boyd Cannon Multerer

Zeke Koch

Raymond Edward Endres

Abhay Vinayak Parasnis

Jason William Fuller

Alexander M Sutton

Roger W Sprague

Lara N Dillingham

Kent S Schliiter

Daniel T Travison

Brian David Cross

Quentin J Clark

Jan H Karachale

Ardan Arac

Raymond Edward Ozzie

Todd R Manion

Ming Gang Liu

Akash Jeevan Sagar

Jack E Ozzie

George P Moromisato

George M Moore

Raman Narayanan

Karthik Raman

Matthew S Augustine

Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie

Farookh P Mohammed

Alexander E Mallet

Nishant Gupta

Vijayendra Gopalrao Vasu

Nitin Sharma

Nick Hofmeister

Ryan Waite

Shelly Guo

Jason M Andre

The management of applications in a computing environment often involves a significant number of computing operations, such as acquiring the application, deploying data objects in various locations, and configuring the application with respect to the deployed device. Conventional computing environments may provide inadequate support throughout a typical application life cycle, especially for a computing environment distributed across many devices. Instead, the computing environment may be represented in a deployable object hierarchy that may be distributed to various devices. An application management service may therefore be provided to install representations of the application in the object hierarchy, and to support many other aspects of the application life cycle, such as application discovery, sharing, updating, and removal. The devices may therefore provide the applications of the computing environment to the user in a consistent manner with reduced manual management among the devices comprising the computing mesh.

Application management within deployable object hierarchy

A unified mechanism for storing device, application, and service state, as well as a rich notification brokerage architecture includes a notification broker. Clients register with the notification broker to receive notifications for changes to state properties. When a registered state property changes, a notification broker determines which clients to notify of the state change and provides the client with a notification regarding the change. Clients may be notified whenever a state changes, when a state change meets a predetermined condition, or based on a schedule. An application may also be launched in response to a state change. An application programming interface (API) is provided that provides a unified way of accessing state change information across different components within the device.

Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes

Systems and methods for implementing online and offline applications are described. Such systems and methods may in some cases provide the same programming interface, regardless of whether the application is online or offline. Such systems and methods may also or instead in some cases provide additional or other possible capabilities, including installation without elevated privileges, simplified data synchronization, sharing of applications and application data, access to data from other applications, and richer client functionality than may be provided by an application such as a web browser.

Running applications in an online or offline mode based on the availability of the connection to the remote web server

Described is a method and system a unified mechanism for storing device, application, and service state, as well as a rich notification brokerage architecture. Clients register with a notification broker to receive notifications for changes to state properties. When a registered state property changes, a notification broker determines which clients to notify of the state change and provides the client with a notification regarding the change. Clients may be notified whenever a state changes, when a state change meets a predetermined condition, or based on a schedule. An application may also be launched in response to a state change. An application programming interface (API) is provided that provides a unified way of accessing state change information across different components within the device.

In scenarios involving a data set accessible through a protocol, operations sets may be formulated for performing various operations on the data set, and may be expressed as resource scripts according to a scripting language. However, such resource scripts may be difficult to design due to the complicated aspects of the interaction, such as asynchrony, network transport, the syntax of the scripting language, and the details of the protocol. A design environment may be devised to facilitate designers in generating resource scripts, e.g., through the manipulation of visual elements. The design environment may abstract the lower-level working details of the resource scripts, and may allow designers to focus on the logical designing of the operations set. The design environment may then automatically generate the resource script from the operations set in accordance with the constraints of the script language and the protocol.

Interactive design environments to visually model, debug and execute resource oriented programs

A data set may be managed by a host that provides access to clients through a protocol, such as a RESTful HTTP interface. A resource script may be expressed according to a script language featuring two types of instructions: data set instructions that correspond to the verbs of the protocol, and flow control instructions that alter the flow of execution of the resource script. At runtime, an execution context for the resource script may be selected as a local execution context (through a local script processor that issues protocol verbs to the host based on the data set operations) or a remote execution context (by sending the resource script to a script processor located on the host.) The runtime selection of data context may be executed without having to reconfigure the resource script, and with an equivalent effect on the data set.

Declarative programming model for authoring and execution control and data flow for resource oriented system

A computing environment may be represented as a deployable object hierarchy, which may be organized according to an object hierarchy schema that is commonly shared among the computing environment host and the devices that are configured to render the computing environment. A particular object hierarchy schema is presented in detail for representing a computing environment, wherein many objects of the computing environment are modeled as resources that may be distinctly addressable (e.g., in a RESTful object hierarchy.) Many types of objects and properties thereof are presented in order to elucidate an exemplary object hierarchy schema and to illustrate exemplary objects and object hierarchies organized according thereto. Additional properties of various object hierarchy schemas include extensibility, deployability, and object addressing models with various advantages.

Computing environment representation

Data sets of various types may be accessible through a host according to a protocol, such as a RESTful HTTP interface. Various domains may involve domain-specific processes to be executed as pre-triggers or post-triggers of various protocol requests (e.g., an HTTP GET request specifying a Read operation on an access-restricted data set may involve an authorization operations set that verifies the access privileges of the requester.) A host of the data set may be configured to receive a resource script expressing the operations set in a script language, to store the resource script, and to associated it with at least one data set and at least one verb of the protocol. Upon later receiving a protocol request specifying the verb and the resource, the host may then execute the resource script (as a pre-trigger and/or as a post-trigger) in accordance with the business logic of the domain.

Declarative programming model for modeling and execution of triggers for resource oriented system

A unified data access mechanism can provide transparent access to data that is either stored locally or remotely. Application programs can direct data requests and data modifications to this singular component without foreknowledge of where the data is stored. The unified data access mechanism can work in concert with a synchronization mechanism that can maintain data synchronization between local data and remote data. Requested or modified data can be identified as stored locally or remotely based on the namespace of the data. If the data is stored remotely, the user credentials associated with the user's process space within which the application program is executing can be utilized to identify, and then provide, relevant authentication information to the remote data store, should it be required.

Transparent access mechanism for local and remote data

The present invention provides systems and methods that can be used to manage state on a cluster comprising a plurality of application servers. A system according to one aspect of the invention comprises a plurality of application servers each of which is equipped to process requests, host unique state, and selectively forward requests. Client requests can arrive at any of the application servers. The servers forward client requests, as needed. A target computer system identification used in request forwarding can be provided with a response to the client whenever a cluster member develops state while carrying out a client request. The client, can include the request forwarding data in subsequent requests that are part of the same session. The invention provides a standards-compliant and secure system for allowing applications servers to effectuate requests that require processing by a particular target computer system.

Systems and methods for managing state in a cluster of servers

A user interface to display and manage a plurality of entities as if a single entity is provided. The user interface includes a representation of the collection of entities as a whole, and a representation of members associated with the entity. If an action is performed on the representation of the entities as a whole, then the action is propagated to the collection of entities, if the action is performed on the representation of the member associated with the entity, then the action is directed to the member.

User interface to display and manage an entity and associated resources

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Ori Amiga