DELIVERY OF A USER INTERFACE USING HYPERTEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL

• US 20120324358A1
• Filed: 06/16/2011
• Published: 12/20/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 06/16/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Vmware LLC (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: VMware, Inc. (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Inventors: JOOSTE, Sarel Kobus
• Granted Patent: US 9,600,350 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/733
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2209/545 Gui
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/54 Interprogram communication

Abstract

A method is provided to remotely access an application hosted by a server and having a corresponding application graphical user interface (GUI) represented on the server, the method comprising: a client automatically sending GUI display update requests to the server throughout a duration of the access, the requests being HTTP requests over corresponding HTTP connections.

Claims

1. A method for remotely accessing an application hosted by a server and having a corresponding application graphical user interface (GUI) represented on the server, the method comprising:

causing the client to automatically send GUI display update requests to the server throughout a duration of the access, wherein each of the GUI display update requests is communicated to the server via a corresponding HTTP connection; and

receiving from the server, in response to the GUI display update request, a response from the server that includes an encoded image of at least a portion of the GUI.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein:

the client sends the GUI display update request from a browser; and

the method is performed by code executing in conjunction with the browser.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the code executing in conjunction with the browser is downloaded from the server and executed locally.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the code is Javascript code.

5. The method of claim 2, wherein the method further comprises decoding the encoded image and causing the browser to render the decoded image on a local display.

6. The method of claim 5, further comprising waiting for the decoded image to be produced on the local display by the browser before sending out a new GUI display update request.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

receiving a user input and responsive to the user input sending a user interface device (UID) request via a corresponding HTTP connection, the UID request containing a representation of the user input for injection into the application.

8. The method of claim 2, wherein the response from the server also includes location information, the location information identifies which portion of the GUI is represented by the encoded image, the method further comprising:

instructing the browser to produce an updated GUI display as a function of the current update portion and a previous representation of the GUI display produced by the browser, the current update portion being overlaid on the previous representation at a location corresponding to the location information in the response from the server.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein the location information includes cascade style sheet (CSS) instructions that contain the location of the encoded image in relation to the GUI, the CSS instructions being executed by the browser to position the encoded image on the local display in a manner consistent with portion of the GUI is represented by the encoded image.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the encoded image in the response from the server is binary coded.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein the encoded image in the response from the server is encoded in plain text, the method further comprising decoding the encoded image and re-encoding the encoded image to produce a binary coded image;

and

causing the browser to render the decoded image on a local display.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein the application graphical user interface includes an entire desktop view generated by an operating system.

13. The method of claim 12, wherein the operating system is executing in a virtual machine.

14. The method of claim 1, wherein the application graphical user interface includes a user interface generated by only one application executing on the server.

15. A method for providing remote access to a graphical user interface (GUI) generated at a server and represented on the server by a bitmap image within a frame buffer on the server, the method comprising:

receiving successive GUI display update requests from a client, each of the GUI display update requests being received by the server via a corresponding HTTP connection; and

responsive to each of the successive GUI display update requests, sending to the client a response that includes an encoded image of at least a portion of the GUI.

16. The method of claim 15, further comprising:

transmitting executable code to the client upon an initial connection to the client, the code causing the client to send the successive GUI display update requests.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein the code executes in conjunction with an Internet browser executed by the client.

18. The method of claim 15, further comprising:

identifying a location in the frame buffer containing an update, the update including modified image data;

encoding a region of the frame buffer including the modified image data into the encoded image;

including in the response in addition to the encoded image, location information identifying a position of the region of the frame buffer that was encoded into the encoded image.

19. The method of claim 18, wherein the position information is included in cascasde style sheet (CCS) instructions included in the response, the CSS instructions causing the client to position the encoded image on an output display at a location consistent with a the region of the frame buffer in relation to the frame buffer as a whole.

20. The method of claim 18, wherein the encoding comprises encoding the image into a plain-text encoded image.

21. A method for providing remote access to an application, the method comprising:

maintaining a mapping between a plurality of URLs and a corresponding plurality of applications;

receiving a URL from a remote user;

identifying one application of the corresponding applications, the one application corresponding to the received URL;

authenticating the user and determining whether the user has authorization to access the one application;

remoting the one application to the user via a remoting protocol when the user is authenticated and has the authorization to access the one application.

22. The method of claim 21, wherein the remoting protocol includes receiving a request for a GUI update over a corresponding HTTP connection, and sending a response to the request over the corresponding HTTP connection, the response including the GUI update, the GUI update including at least a portion of a frame buffer containing a GUI for the application.