System and method for broadcasting data over a computer network

Abstract

A system and method for broadcasting data in the form of instant messages over a computer network. The broadcast systempreferably includes a messaging manager, an integration engine, a subscription manager, a scheduler, and a broadcast engine. The messaging managerinterfaces with all other components and provides a multi-threaded, run-time engine that coordinates the integration, triggering, scheduling, and message delivery activities for scalable broadcast applications. The integration engineprovides a system for 'exposing' Web services and 'consuming' external data streams. The subscription managerincludes an event watcher, which monitors the state of the external environment it interacts with, and an event dispatcher, which collects event subscriptions and ensures the instant delivery of events to all subscribers by way of the broadcast engine. The schedulerallows users to customize the systemin order to schedule outgoing messages through the broadcast engine. The broadcast engineenhances the inherent limitations of current IM technology by providing a multi-threaded broadcasting engine capable of sending volumes of messages from one server to literally thousands of IM clients concurrently over different private and public networks in one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many formats.