PUSH MECHANISM FOR EFFICIENTLY SENDING AGGREGATED DATA ITEMS TO CLIENT

• US 20090204666A1
• Filed: 02/13/2008
• Published: 08/13/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 02/13/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Van Eaton, Jim R., Raman, Sridhar, Sana, Giselli Panontini De Souza, Kling, Daniel V., Simpson, Russell L.
• Granted Patent: US 8,260,864 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/203
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/1069 Session establishment or de-establishment
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/06 specially adapted for file transfer, e.g. file transfer protocol [FTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/54 Presence management, e.g. monitoring or registration for receipt of user log-on information, or the connection status of the users
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/55 Push-based network services

Abstract

A server push model for client/server communications. The push architecture operates on top of a non-push (e.g., request/response) protocol (e.g., HTTP) to combine notifications from multiple data sources (e.g., email, text messaging, etc.). The server can be a middle-tier server (or proxy) to which a single web client registers interest in one or more notification types from one or more data sources. The mid-tier server aggregates the notifications from the various data sources and delivers the notifications to the requesting client via a single “push” pipe. The web client then distributes each notification to the appropriate parts of the client user interface. A producer/consumer locking mechanism eliminates blocking threads waiting on a mutual exclusion lock. A notification throttling mechanism distinguishes different types of notifications in order to guarantee that the client is not overloaded with too much information.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented data communication system, comprising:

a data component for receiving and aggregating data items from multiple data sources for transmission to a client to which the data items are directed; and

a push component for establishing a communications pipe based on a request/response protocol and pushing the aggregated data items to the client via the communications pipe.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the client is a web browser that receives the aggregated data items, which items are message notification data, from the push component of a middle-tier server.

3. The system of claim 1, further comprising a registration component for registering the client for types of the data items the client should receive.

4. The system of claim 1, further comprising a locking component for managing threads by processing data items of incoming threads via a holding thread that holds lock to the communications pipe.

5. The system of claim 1, further comprising a throttling component for managing push of the data items via the communications pipe based on item classification by a data source.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the request/response protocol is HTTP.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein the HTTP protocol operates in chunked mode to send multiple chunk responses to a client for a request.

8. The system of claim 7, wherein the request serves to initiate the communications pipe via which the data items are sent as partial HTTP responses.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the data component and the push component are part of a middle-tier server that receives the data items from the multiple data sources and pushes the data items to the client as response chunks to a request.

10. A computer-implemented data communication system, comprising:

a data component for receiving and aggregating data items from multiple data sources for transmission to a web client to which the data items are directed;

a push component for establishing a communications pipe based on a request/response protocol and pushing the aggregated data items to the client via the communications pipe; and

a throttling component for managing push of the aggregated data items via the communications pipe based on item classification by the data sources.

11. The system of claim 10, further comprising a locking component for managing threads of the data items by processing data items of acquiring threads via a holding thread that holds lock to the communications pipe.

12. The system of claim 10, wherein the request/response protocol is HTTP operating in chunked mode to send multiple chunk responses to the web client for a request, the request serving to initiate the communications pipe via which the data items are sent as partial HTTP responses.

13. A computer-implemented method of communicating data to a client, comprising:

receiving notifications from one or more data sources, the notifications directed to a client;

receiving a request for the notifications from the client;

processing the notifications into chunks based on a request/response protocol; and

pushing the chunks of a holding thread to the client as multiple responses to the request.

14. The method of claim 13, further comprising keeping the request open until all chunks for the thread are pushed to the client.

15. The method of claim 13, wherein the client is a browser application that receives the chunks from a mid-tier server based on the request/response protocol.

16. The method of claim 13, further comprising locking out acquiring threads directed to the client based on the holding thread and processing responses of the acquiring threads through the request of the holding thread.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein the acquiring threads notify the holding thread of the acquiring thread responses to be processed, and then the acquiring threads exit.

18. The method of claim 13, further comprising throttling push of the chunk responses to the client based on classification of the associated notifications by the client.

19. The method of claim 13, further comprising registering the client for different types of notifications the client is expected to receive.

20. The method of claim 13, wherein the chunks are consumed by the client as individual notification packets.