Object framework and services for periodically recurring operations

• US 20040221289A1
• Filed: 06/01/2004
• Published: 11/04/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 12/06/1996
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: DʼSouza, David J., Ahmed, Mohsin, Endres, Raymond Edward, Martineau, Teresa, Snapper, Erik Jon, Mitchell, Darren, Ellison-Taylor, Ian Michael, Nawaz, Sabina, Shyam, Bharat
• Granted Patent: US 8,065,673 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 718/102
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/958 Organisation or management of web site content, e.g. publishing, maintaining pages or automatic linking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2209/543 Local
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/60 Software deployment
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/485 Task life-cycle, e.g. stopping, restarting, resuming execution G06F9/4881 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/542 Event management; Broadcasting; Multicasting; Notifications
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1095 Replication or mirroring of data, e.g. scheduling or transport for data synchronisation between network nodes
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching

Abstract

A computer system includes an object oriented framework that provides a set of application integration interfaces that support programmatic updating operations for maintaining locally stored copies of resources such as hypertext document pages from remote servers on a computer network. The updating operations continually check for updates to the data at the remote server and download updated versions of the resources to maintain concurrency of the locally stored copy. The updating operations are performed while a connection to the remote network is left idle, to maximize usage of on-line connection time. The updating operations also can be programmatically scheduled by a client program of the updating operations. The updating operations include updating the contents of a folder or directory in a local file system as specified in a file at a remote server on the network, and providing automatically updating and populating groups of sites or document pages organized by category.

Claims

1. An object-oriented framework for scheduling an operation to be performed by an agent object on a periodically recurring basis in a computer, comprising:

a scheduler object;

an scheduler object integration interface supported on the scheduler object for use by a client application program to set a schedule item indicating the periodically recurring basis on which to cause the agent object to perform the operation;

the scheduler object operating responsive to the client application program setting the schedule item withe scheduler object intergration interface to cause the agent object to be persistently stored in the computer, and to cause the agent object to be restored and initiate the operation by the agent object on the periodically recurring basis.

2-30. -30. (Canceled)