Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claims 5, 13, and 19 are currently amended. No claims are canceled. No claims have been newly added. Claims 1-2, 4-10, 12-16, and 18-23 are currently pending for examination.
Response to Arguments
As per applicant’s arguments, pgs. 7-8, regarding the rejection under 35 USC 103, the examiner has considered these arguments and concedes. Neither Baeuerle or Bansal disclose the limitations of “generating a processing object based on the determined information,
wherein the processing object comprises one or more application-specific executable instructions and corresponding data for each application in the set of applications to process the dynamic request” or “in response to the notification, causes one or more processes to be executed by a common execution service on behalf of the at least one application by retrieving the application-specific executable instructions and corresponding data for the at least one application from the processing object,”, nor do they teach “a common execution service”. As such, neither Baeuerle or Bansal are relied upon to disclose these limitations in the new grounds of rejection under 35 USC 103.
As per applicant’s arguments, pg. 9, regarding the rejection of claim 21 under 35 USC 103, the examiner has considered these arguments and concedes. As such, Zhou is not relied upon to disclose the limitations of claim 21 in the new grounds of rejection under 35 USC 103.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1, 6, 7- 9, 14-15, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Abdelrahman (US 20140012856 A1) in view of Lebaredian (US 12211005 B2) in further view of Chen (US 20050216282 A1) in further view of Kramer (US 20160147508 A1).
As per claim 1, Abdelrahman discloses:
obtaining a dynamic request associated with one or more items (“The user's request can be expressed in a customer order as changing the user's service from "Gold service" to "Diamond service." The user's request can further be expressed in a service order changing a broadband service from a first speed to a second speed”, 0332 ; “More specifically, the technical order calculation provider function can determine what is going to change on the infrastructure element, and can determine one or more technical actions to effectuate the change”, 0333 ; Examiner Note: the user request for a change in service subscription requires changes to numerous infrastructure elements and thus equates to a dynamic request)
determining information for processing the dynamic request, wherein the information comprises at least one action corresponding to the dynamic request and a set of applications impacted by the at least one action (“A service order design and assign provider function can receive the service order and determine that the user needs to be disconnected from a cable network and connected to a fiber network. A technical order calculation provider function can then determine all the technical actions that are required to be done to achieve this future state of the network.", 0332 ; "More specifically, the technical order calculation provider function can determine what is going to change on the infrastructure element, and can determine one or more technical actions to effectuate the change. In these embodiments, the technical order calculation provider function can interpret the service order (including the one or more service order lines, where each service order line includes a service action on a customer-facing service based on customer-facing service specification) in order to generate a configuration of one or more resource-facing services and/or one or more resources that represent a future state of the infrastructure element.", 0333 ; Examiner Note: the generation of a configuration of one or more services and/or resources (corresponding to applications) that represent the future state necessitates determining which services and/or resources will be impacted by the determined action/actions)
Abdelrahman discloses the above limitations of claim 1, but does not disclose sending a notification of the at least one action to each application in the set of applications.
However, Lebaredian discloses:
sending a notification of the at least one action to each respective application in the set of applications, wherein at least one application in the set of applications causes one or more processes to be executed, based at least in part on the notification, to process the dynamic request ("request one or more subscriptions to receive one or more changes to one or more subsets of one or more of the assets; receive one or more notifications corresponding to a set of changes of different sets of changes to at least one asset of the assets, wherein different client applications of the plurality of client applications are notified of the different sets of changes based at least on the different client applications having been granted different subscriptions to different subsets of the subsets of the one or more assets, and wherein the different sets of the changes corresponding to the at least one asset cause, based at least on the one or more notifications, the different client applications to determine different values of one or more properties of a same synchronized object composed of a plurality of the assets and to render the same synchronized object in the virtual environment using the different values", clm.42)
the method is performed by at least one processing device comprising a processor coupled to a memory. ("Embodiments described herein may be discussed in the general context of computer-executable instructions residing on some form of computer-readable storage medium, such as program modules, executed by one or more computers or other devices.", col.3, lines 45-49)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to combine the subscription modification system of Abdelrahman with the asset (application) updating method of Lebaredian in order to reduce the network traffic and computational load associated with the update, Lebaredian, [col.2, lines 7-17].
Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian discloses the above limitations of claim 1, but does not disclose the generation and retrieval of a processing object or common execution environment.
However, Chen discloses:
generating a processing object based on the determined information, wherein the processing object comprises one or more application-specific executable instructions and corresponding data for each application in the set of applications to process the dynamic request (“A business integration system may use business objects to carry data and processing instructions between an integration broker and connectors or an access client. Business objects may represent a request from an integration broker, an event in an application or Web server, or a call from an external site.”, 0006; “If, in step 320 the reverse object discovery agent determines that the business object conforms to a known business object definition, then the control routine for the reverse object discovery agent continues to step 330. In step 330, the reverse object discovery agent forwards the business object to the corresponding application adapter.”, 0058 ; “ As shown by FIG. 4, collaboration code at block 414 first selects from business object 0 452 those records or rows with a value "98" in the "Dept_no" column, and then extracts only the three columns, ID, Dept_no, and Name. Based on the instruction, the reverse object discovery agent may create a partial business object definition BOD with these 3 attributes. Step 2 in the collaboration code at block 414 adds an extra column, "Date," to create business object 1 454. “, 0070 ; “ An exemplary embodiment of the present invention provides a mechanism that is capable of dynamically discovering the mapping of a business object during runtime, as opposed to discovering the mapping during off-line development time.”, 0020 ; Examiner Note: each business object conforming to a known business object definition has a corresponding application, ie- the processing instructions are application specific)
retrieving the application-specific executable instructions and corresponding data for the at least one application from the processing object (“The mapping information in the business object definition provides an application adapter specific instructions about composing (or storing) business objects from (or into) the application data source.”, 0069 ; “As shown by FIG. 4, collaboration code at block 414 first selects from business object 0 452 those records or rows with a value "98" in the "Dept_no" column, and then extracts only the three columns, ID, Dept_no, and Name. Based on the instruction, the reverse object discovery agent may create a partial business object definition BOD with these 3 attributes.”, 0070)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to combine the subscription modification system of Abdelrahman and the asset (application) updating method of Lebaredian with the business object and method of Chen in order to provide the system with a method of process instance generation which allows for process instances to be created with either zero, or fewer pre-defined definitions (Chen, [0021]).
Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen fully discloses the above limitations of claim 1, but does not disclose a common execution service.
However, Kramer discloses:
at least one application in the set of applications, in response to the notification, causes one or more processes to be executed by a common execution service on behalf of the at least one application (“The software application and the instance of the concrete business object class and/or the software application and the further software application preferably are executed during runtime in a shared runtime environment.”, 0035)
The combination of Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer would provide a system capable of executing processes on behalf of an application in response to a notification using a common execution service within a business workflow service. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to combine the subscription modification system of Abdelrahman, the asset (application) updating method of Lebaredian, and the business object and method of Chen with the common execution environment of Kramer in order to provide a method for accessing business, or processing, objects which increases the flexibility and reduces the maintenance costs of the system (Kramer, [0017]).
As per claim 6, Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer fully discloses the limitations of claim 1.
Furthermore, Abdelrahman discloses:
the at least one action comprises at least one of: creating a subscription, modifying a subscription, and canceling a subscription (“The user's request can be expressed in a customer order as changing the user's service from Gold service" to "Diamond service." The user's request can further be expressed in a service order changing a broadband service from a first speed to a second speed.", 0332)
As per claim 7, Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer fully discloses the limitations of claim 1.
Furthermore, Lebaredian discloses:
a first process of the one or more processes causes one or more changes to data, corresponding to the dynamic request, that is associated with a first application in the set of applications, and a second process of the one or more processes makes one or more changes to data, corresponding to the dynamic request, that is associated with a second application in the set of applications. (see fig.6 - first and second changes to elements of assets in databases ; "the one or more communication interfaces to communicate requests from the applications for subscriptions to receive one or more changes to subsets of the assets of the scene", clm.1 "The first change is generated by the first client 102a (a first application)", col.9, lines 65-66 ; " In block 608, in an embodiment, a second change (change 2) is generated by the second client 102b", col.10, lines 37-38)
As per claim 8, Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Baeuerle in further view of Bansal fully discloses the limitations of claim 1.
Furthermore, Lebaredian discloses:
the determining comprises: determining the set of applications from among a plurality of applications of an organization corresponding to one or more of a product and a service associated with the dynamic request ("wherein different client applications of the plurality of client applications are notified of the different sets of changes based at least on the different client applications having been granted different subscriptions to different subsets of the subsets of the one or more assets", clm.42 ; "clients 102a-n include different types of applications such as, but not limited to: a physics simulation application, an artificial intelligence (AI) application, a global illumination (GI) application, a game engine, a computer graphics application, a renderer, a graphics editor, a virtual reality (VR) application, an augmented reality application, and a scripting application. Because they are different from each other, the clients 102a-n can be called “heterogeneous clients.” The clients 102a-n may also be referred to as “microservices.”", col.5, lines 36-45; Examiner Note: notifying a subset of the plurality of applications of changes necessitates having first determining which applications must be affected by the request)
As per claim 9, it is a non-transitory processor-readable storage medium (see Lebaredian, [col.3, lines 45-49]) claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 1, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
As per claim 14, it is a non-transitory processor-readable storage medium claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 6, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
As per claim 15, Abdelrahman discloses:
obtain a dynamic request associated with one or more items (“The user's request can be expressed in a customer order as changing the user's service from "Gold service" to "Diamond service." The user's request can further be expressed in a service order changing a broadband service from a first speed to a second speed”, 0332 ; “More specifically, the technical order calculation provider function can determine what is going to change on the infrastructure element, and can determine one or more technical actions to effectuate the change”, 0333 ; Examiner Note: the user request for a change in service subscription requires changes to numerous infrastructure elements and thus equates to a dynamic request)
determine information for processing the dynamic request, wherein the information comprises at least one action corresponding to the dynamic request and a set of applications impacted by the at least one action (“A service order design and assign provider function can receive the service order and determine that the user needs to be disconnected from a cable network and connected to a fiber network. A technical order calculation provider function can then determine all the technical actions that are required to be done to achieve this future state of the network.", 0332 ; "More specifically, the technical order calculation provider function can determine what is going to change on the infrastructure element, and can determine one or more technical actions to effectuate the change. In these embodiments, the technical order calculation provider function can interpret the service order (including the one or more service order lines, where each service order line includes a service action on a customer-facing service based on customer-facing service specification) in order to generate a configuration of one or more resource-facing services and/or one or more resources that represent a future state of the infrastructure element.", 0333 ; Examiner Note: the generation of a configuration of one or more services and/or resources (corresponding to applications) that represent the future state necessitates determining which services and/or resources will be impacted by the determined action/actions)
Abdelrahman discloses the above limitations of claim 15, but does not disclose sending a notification of the at least one action to each application in the set of applications.
Furthermore, Lebaredian discloses:
sending a notification of the at least one action to each respective application in the set of applications, wherein at least one application in the set of applications causes one or more processes to be executed, based at least in part on the notification, to process the dynamic request ("request one or more subscriptions to receive one or more changes to one or more subsets of one or more of the assets; receive one or more notifications corresponding to a set of changes of different sets of changes to at least one asset of the assets, wherein different client applications of the plurality of client applications are notified of the different sets of changes based at least on the different client applications having been granted different subscriptions to different subsets of the subsets of the one or more assets, and wherein the different sets of the changes corresponding to the at least one asset cause, based at least on the one or more notifications, the different client applications to determine different values of one or more properties of a same synchronized object composed of a plurality of the assets and to render the same synchronized object in the virtual environment using the different values", clm.42)
An apparatus comprising: at least one processing device comprising a processor coupled to a memory; the at least one processing device being configured. ("Embodiments described herein may be discussed in the general context of computer-executable instructions residing on some form of computer-readable storage medium, such as program modules, executed by one or more computers or other devices.", col.3, lines 45-49)
Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian discloses the above limitations of claim 15, but does not disclose the generation and retrieval of a processing object or common execution environment.
Furthermore, Chen discloses:
generate a processing object based on the determined information, wherein the processing object comprises one or more application-specific executable instructions and corresponding data for each application in the set of applications to process the dynamic request (“A business integration system may use business objects to carry data and processing instructions between an integration broker and connectors or an access client. Business objects may represent a request from an integration broker, an event in an application or Web server, or a call from an external site.”, 0006; “If, in step 320 the reverse object discovery agent determines that the business object conforms to a known business object definition, then the control routine for the reverse object discovery agent continues to step 330. In step 330, the reverse object discovery agent forwards the business object to the corresponding application adapter.”, 0058 ; “ As shown by FIG. 4, collaboration code at block 414 first selects from business object 0 452 those records or rows with a value "98" in the "Dept_no" column, and then extracts only the three columns, ID, Dept_no, and Name. Based on the instruction, the reverse object discovery agent may create a partial business object definition BOD with these 3 attributes. Step 2 in the collaboration code at block 414 adds an extra column, "Date," to create business object 1 454. “, 0070 ; “ An exemplary embodiment of the present invention provides a mechanism that is capable of dynamically discovering the mapping of a business object during runtime, as opposed to discovering the mapping during off-line development time.”, 0020 ; Examiner Note: each business object conforming to a known business object definition has a corresponding application, ie- the processing instructions are application specific)
retrieving the application-specific executable instructions and corresponding data for the at least one application from the processing object (“The mapping information in the business object definition provides an application adapter specific instructions about composing (or storing) business objects from (or into) the application data source.”, 0069 ; “As shown by FIG. 4, collaboration code at block 414 first selects from business object 0 452 those records or rows with a value "98" in the "Dept_no" column, and then extracts only the three columns, ID, Dept_no, and Name. Based on the instruction, the reverse object discovery agent may create a partial business object definition BOD with these 3 attributes.”, 0070)
Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen fully discloses the above limitations of claim 15, but does not disclose a common execution service.
However, Kramer discloses:
at least one application in the set of applications, in response to the notification, causes one or more processes to be executed by a common execution service on behalf of the at least one application (“The software application and the instance of the concrete business object class and/or the software application and the further software application preferably are executed during runtime in a shared runtime environment.”, 0035)
Claims 2, 10, and 16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Abdelrahman (US 20140012856 A1) in view of Lebaredian (US 12211005 B2) in further view of Chen (US 20050216282 A1) in further view of Kramer (US 20160147508 A1) in further view of Baeuerle.
As per claim 2, Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer fully discloses the limitations of claim 1.
Furthermore, Abdelrahman discloses:
the determining the information comprises: applying one or more rules to the dynamic request to derive the at least one action and the one or more processes (“The service order can be designed, and one or more technical orders can be generated by a technical order calculation provider function identified as "Calculate Technical Order.", 0087 ; " a technical order activation provider function configured to receive a technical order and translate the technical order into one or more command sequences delivered to one or more infrastructure elements", 0102 ; Examiner Note: the use of the “Calculate Technical Order” function equates to the application of a rule to determine an action and process for implementing the request)
Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer fully discloses the above limitation of claim 2, but does not disclose storing information corresponding to the at least one derived action and the set of applications impacted by the action.
However, Baeuerle discloses:
generating the processing object comprises storing information corresponding to derived at least one action, the set of applications impacted by the at least one action, the application-specific executable instructions, and the corresponding data, within the processing object (see fig.2- the nodes of the root correspond to the set of applications impacted by the at least one action, the root and nodes equate to the application-specific instructions, and the data (221) equates to the corresponding data ; “business objects may be created that store and manipulate data within the application”, 0015 ; “The system could thus iteratively examine each business object to select predecessor and successor objects and construct a process instance.”, 0028 ; “Each business object may be assigned a unique identifier within the application.”, 0015 ; Examiner Note: the unique identifier equates to information corresponding to the action)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to combine the system of Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer with the business objects of Baeuerle in order to provide the system with a method which allows for process instances to be constructed and analyzed easily and quickly (Baeuerle, [0028]).
As per claim 10, it is a non-transitory processor-readable storage medium claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 2, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
As per claim 16, it is an apparatus claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 2, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Claims 4, 12, and 18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Abdelrahman (US 20140012856 A1) in view of Lebaredian (US 12211005 B2) in further view of Chen (US 20050216282 A1) in further view of Kramer (US 20160147508 A1) in further view of Bansal (US 20030120593 A1).
As per claim 4, Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer fully discloses the limitations of claim 1.
Furthermore, Lebaredian discloses:
the at least one application causes the one or more processes to be executed using an application programming interface associated with the common execution service ("In an embodiment, each of the clients 102a-n connects to the server 104 through a port or socket 112, and communicates with the server using a common application programming interface (API) that enables bidirectional communication (e.g., the WebSockets API).", col.5, lines 32-36 ; “The first change is provided from the database to a second application.”, col.1, lines 62-63 ; see fig.1- database within server; Examiner Note: the changes, which correspond to the processes, are provided from the database which is within the server, thus necessarily executed using the API which enables the server and client application to communicate)
Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer fully discloses the above limitation of claim 2, but does not disclose an API associated with the common execution service.
However, Bansal discloses:
an application programming interface associated with the common execution service (“A new JRE or C++ runtime, for example, is certified for use with components such as: … ; The application programming interfaces (APIs) for vendor products such as content management, workflow and eCommerce services”, 0053-0056)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to combine the system of Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer with the common execution service having an API of Bansal in order to enable the business workflow system to directly work with client applications (Bansal, [0413]).
As per claim 12, it is a non-transitory processor-readable storage medium claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 4, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
As per claim 18, it is an apparatus claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 4, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Claims 5, 13, and 19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Abdelrahman (US 20140012856 A1) in view of Lebaredian (US 12211005 B2) in further view of Chen (US 20050216282 A1) in further view of Kramer (US 20160147508 A1) in further view of Zhou (US 20230394439 A1).
As per claim 5, Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer fully discloses the limitations of claim 2, but does not disclose determining that a request is not a dynamic request and processing the request without using the service.
However, Zhou discloses:
obtaining a further request; determining that the further request is not a dynamic request, wherein the further request is processed without using the service (“Further, implementations of the present disclosure enable the data service to flexibly process data requests. For example, in response to receiving a data request, the data service need only determine whether there are dedicated properties in request headers, taskInstanceID and taskDecisionID, for the workflow. If yes, the data service processes the request for the workflow service indicated by the properties. If no, the data service processes the request as a normal data service without reference to the workflow service.", 0041; Examiner Note: processing the request without reference to the workflow service equates to processing the request without the service)
The system of Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer in further view of Zhou would be capable of determining that a request is a static request and opting not to utilize the service to process the request. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to combine the teachings of Abdelrahman, Lebaredian, Chen, and Kramer with those of Zhou in order to provide a unified solution for multiple types of request (Zhou, [0048]).
As per claim 13, it is a non-transitory processor-readable storage medium claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 5, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
As per claim 19, it is an apparatus claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 5, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Claims 21-23 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Abdelrahman (US 20140012856 A1) in view of Lebaredian (US 12211005 B2) in further view of Chen (US 20050216282 A1) in further view of Kramer (US 20160147508 A1) in further view of Hussain (US 12189519 B1).
As per claim 21, Abdelrahman in view of Lebaredian in further view of Chen in further view of Kramer fully discloses the limitations of claim 1, but does not disclose application specific executable instructions to provision a computing resource.
However, Hussain discloses:
the one or more application-specific executable instructions comprise at least one of: an instruction to adjust a license count, an instruction to deprovision one or more computer resources, and an instruction to provision one or more computer resources. (“Automation templates may be generated to execute a set of instructions to provision an environment with certain resources or extensions, but these templates may be specific to applications and resources from the provider of the resources.”, col.2, lines 6-10)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to combine the teachings of Abdelrahman, Lebaredian, Chen, and Kramer with those of Hussain in order to provide a means for the client of the system to obtain and modify access to resources provided as part of a resource provider environment (Hussain, [col. 2, lines 60-67]).
As per claim 22, it is a non-transitory processor-readable storage medium claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 21, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
As per claim 23, it is an apparatus claim with substantially the same limitations as claim 21, and as such, it is rejected for substantially the same reasons.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Jones (US 20220253347 A1) – discloses a process which may reduce the start latency of serverless microservices. Processor may detect an incoming request or event to an application in a serverless microservice environment. The request may initiate a chain of invocations of one or more microservices.
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/R.M.V./
Examiner, Art Unit 2196
/HIREN P PATEL/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2196