1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for managing interactions between computer applications and computer users. More specifically, the present invention relates to a user proxy server, which provides a mechanism through which computer-based applications can communicate with computer users.
2. Related Art
The application server architecture—which predominates today for delivering applications to mobile devices as well as the desktop—has been developed based on specific assumptions. In times past, an enterprise application may have been expected to be “stand-alone” and accessed from a dedicated terminal. In many cases, it made sense for user interfaces to be hand-built and hard-wired by an application vendor or integrator. Later, the web browser replaced the dedicated terminal as the preferred access method; this was well accommodated by “application servers,” which are Web servers fitted with a number of features to support such things as transactions, dynamic content, and programmatic extensions.
Like Web servers, which had been created to broadcast content, the application server architecture entangled the control of the details of the application user interface (the “presentation layer”) with the administration of the server. Consequently, certain assumptions were built into the application server architecture. In particular that, as with a dedicated terminal, user interfaces would be created once (or change infrequently) and shared by all users.
Due to a number of factors, these assumptions are no longer valid for many mission-critical applications. Such factors include: the continually increasing importance of computing to business processes; the growing complexity, heterogeneity, and variability of application environments; and especially the advent of multiple access devices (e.g. desktop, PDA, WAP, VXML) and web services. In the modern world, different industries, enterprises, business units, or individuals have different needs (i.e. mission-critical business tasks to perform) in certain application domains. Likewise, their needs now often involve using aspects of several software applications or web services in task-specific combinations on several devices. Furthermore, needs, devices, and applications change.
At present, the relatively few server administrators in an organization are too heavily burdened to provide customized integrated solutions for every evolving need. On the other hand, the only one-size-fits-all solution is a lowest-common-denominator solution, and that common denominator gets lower and lower as the network of users, devices, and services grows. Thus, if one attempts to create a unified user interface with an application server, one ends up with a result where general-purpose (rather than task-specific and personalized) resources or controls are exposed. The user must manually navigate through these resources or controls at runtime to manually extract desired data and must carry information from step to step (i.e. the user must browse).
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus that enables an application to interact with a user without suffering from the above-described problems.