PRIOR ART REQUEST: US7,051,342 - Method and system for remote automation of object oriented applications

Question

This is a prior art request for U.S. Patent No. 7051342 "Method and system for remote automation of object oriented applications", belonging to Microsoft Corporation. The patent expires 2021-10-22, was filed 2004-10-22 and was granted 2006-05-23.

The first claim and the claims related to it are:

1. In a distributed computing system including a client computer having a multi-tasking, threaded, operating system, and plural threads in a client process sharing processor resources, the client computer communicating with plural remote computers providing business services applications on behalf of the client process, the computing system handling object references requested by said plural threads in the client process, the client computer comprising: at least one processing unit and a memory;
   
   means for providing a common operating system thread to handle the runtime resolution of object reference requests;
   
   means for receiving from a first thread running in the client process, a reference request for a first object providing business application services;
   
   means for determining by the common operating system thread, a first remote computer providing access to the first object and establishing a first communications channel with the first remote computer;
   
   means for receiving from the first thread running in the client process, a reference request for a second object providing business application services;
   
   means for determining by the common operating system thread, a second remote computer providing access to the second object and establishing a second communications channel with the second remote computer;
   
   means for receiving from a second thread running in the client process, a reference request for an object providing business application services;
   
   means for determining by the common operating system thread, that the reference requested by the second thread resolves to the first object; and
   
   means for providing business applications services to the client process via the established communications channels;
   
   wherein said business application services provided to the client process comprise data received via the established communications channels and wherein said data received was obtained by the business application services from one or more additional remote computers comprising data application services.
   2. The computing system of claim 1 wherein the data received via the established communications channels is sent from the first and the second objects.
   3. The computing system of claim 2 wherein the first and second objects obtained the received data from plural of said additional remote computers comprising data application services.

Answer 1

This sounds a lot like Remote procedure calls (RPC) and the DCOM marshaller.