Application server with a protocol-neutral programming model for developing telecommunications-based applications

Abstract

An application server is described for development of telecommunications-based software applications. The application server provides a protocol-neutral programming model for application developers. Rather than having to account for specific protocol entry points into the server, all interactions in the server are abstracted as asynchronous events through the event broker layer. State management and concurrency are implemented as an actor-based model, where each actor owns its own segment of state and other actors wishing to update that state send asynchronous events to the owner. Thus, any communication in the various protocols can be expressed as an asynchronous event passed to, from and between the actors, who are each responsible for maintaining their own segment of state locally. This architecture allows multiple protocols to be consumed in one process, allow applications sessions to span multiple environments and protocols, and allows the programming model to be decoupled from any particular protocol entry point.