Processing Event Notifications with an Event Sink

• US 20090113452A1
• Filed: 10/25/2007
• Published: 04/30/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 10/25/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Seacat, Lisa A., Grigsby, Travis M., Lyle, Ruthie D.
• Granted Patent: US 8,117,304 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 719/318
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2209/545 Gui
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/542 Event management; Broadcasting; Multicasting; Notifications
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/043 using or handling presence information

Abstract

Applications generating events, and system facilities generating events, send notifications of the events to a system event sink. The event sink is preferably associated with an operating system, and provides an application programming interface for registering listeners. (In one alternative approach, the event sink operates as a centrally-accessible or network-accessible entity, where it may concurrently interact with more than one client.) Upon receiving a notification of an event, the event sink forwards the notification to any registered listeners. Optionally, filters may be used to specify criteria to be met before a notification is forwarded to the listener. An event does not rely a particular application for displaying the event to an end user. As one example, notification of a newly-arrived e-mail message might be presented in a chat window of an instant messaging client.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method of processing event notifications, comprising:

receiving, at an executing application that registered interest in receiving at least one event notification, the event notification, wherein the event notification pertains to a message or a status of a different application or of an operating system and was produced by the different application or the operating system responsive to the message or the status and sent by the producer to an event sink with which the receiving application registered the interest and from which the event notification is sent to the receiving application; and

rendering the received event notification by the receiving application instead of, or in addition to, rendering the message or the status by a rendering mechanism of the producer of the received event notification.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the rendering of the received event notification by the receiving application enables current focus to remain in a window of the receiving application in which the rendering occurs.

3. The method according to claim 1, wherein the rendering comprises visually displaying the received event notification in a currently-active user interface window of the receiving application.

4. The method according to claim 1, wherein the receiving application is a video player and the rendering comprises visually displaying the received event notification in closed captioning depicted from the video player.

5. The method according to claim 1, wherein the receiving application is an audio player and the rendering comprises audibly playing the received event notification from the audio player using a text-to-speech generator.

6. The method according to claim 1, wherein the rendering comprises visually displaying the received event notification in each currently-open user interface window of a computer on which the receiving application is executing.

7. The method according to claim 1, wherein the receiving application is an instant messaging application and the rendering comprises visually displaying the received event notification in a currently-active chat window of the instant messaging application.

8. The method according to claim 7, wherein the rendering is suppressed if a current instant messaging status of the instant messaging application is other than active.

9. The method according to claim 1, wherein preferences of a user of the executing application control the rendering of the received event notification.

10. The method according to claim 1, further comprising:

providing a selectable link on the rendered event notification rendered by the receiving application; and

opening the message in a window of the producer of the received event notification responsive to activation of the selectable link.

11. A computer-implemented system for processing event notifications, comprising:

a computer comprising a processor; and

instructions which execute, using the processor, to implement functions comprising;

receiving, at an executing application that registered interest in receiving at least one event notification, the event notification, wherein the event notification pertains to a message or a status of a different application or of an operating system and was produced by the different application or the operating system responsive to the message or the status and sent by the producer to an event sink with which the receiving application registered the interest and from which the event notification is sent to the receiving application; and

rendering the received event notification by the receiving application instead of, or in addition to, rendering the message or the status by a rendering mechanism of the producer of the received event notification.

12. A computer program product for processing event notifications, the computer program product embodied on at least one computer-usable medium and comprising computer-usable program code for:

receiving, at an executing application that registered interest in receiving at least one event notification, the event notification, wherein the event notification pertains to a message or a status of a different application or of an operating system and was produced by the different application or the operating system responsive to the message or the status and sent by the producer to an event sink with which the receiving application registered the interest and from which the event notification is sent to the receiving application; and

rendering the received event notification by the receiving application instead of, or in addition to, rendering the message or the status by a rendering mechanism of the producer of the received event notification.