System and methods for controlling an application

Abstract

Users of network based software applications typically interact with an application via a command line interface or a menu interface. Conventional voice-driven communication threads rely on a dedicated communication line (connection) to maintain a session context, or state, between a user and an application for the duration of a session. Such state information enables the application to reference a session context for the session duration, and employ the session context to maintain a state from previous atomic messages sent and received between the device and the application. By maintaining and referencing a session context indicative of previous messages, an application identifies an atomic message as corresponding to a particular session context, and employs the session context to process the message within the context, or environment, defined by the previous messages in the session. In this manner, a stateless protocol such as a text messaging protocol is operable to invoke stateful applications from the stateless infrastructure by employing the session context defined by the session of request and response messages.