Patent ID: 7730169

Claim:
A method for serving applications to a target client computer for a subscribing institution, comprising: configuring a third party application hosting system to provide one or more applications on behalf of subscribing institutions to requesting clients, wherein the subscribing institutions include organizations that outsourced hosting of one or more applications to an organization that controls the third party application hosting system; receiving, by the third party application hosting system via a public computer network, a signal indicating that a client computer selected a hyper-text application link for an application displayed by the subscribing institution; determining that the subscribing institution is authorized to have applications provided by the third party application hosting system based on user account information in the signal indicating that the client computer selected the hyper-text application link; sending, by the third party application hosting system, a helper application to the client computer, wherein the application resides on the third party application hosting system and the helper application is configured to control execution of the application on the client computer by downloading portions of the application for execution, periodically communicating with the third party application host system to determine whether to shutdown the application, and deleting the downloaded portions of the application when the application is shutdown; and sending at least portions of the application in response to requests from the helper application.