Patent ID: 7571346

Claim:
A method for gracefully continuing an operation in an environment of lost or intermittent communications, wherein an event driven interoperability application package running cooperatively across multiple teamed devices gracefully continues its operations and/or partially recovers from temporarily loosing communications with devices that are part of the team, the method comprising: (1) generating a communications session lost type event instance on a team member device when communication from the team member device to a teamed device is lost or interrupted and cannot be reestablished within a predetermined or dynamically determined time period and wherein each team member and teamed device is carrying out part of the intent of an application package; (2) sending the communications session lost type event directly or via a queue of events which drives synchronous operations of the application package to the application event processing unit which handles communications session lost events; (3) the event processing unit of the application package modifying the behavior of the application package where possible to continue its operations without the teamed device with which communications has been lost or interrupted; (4) generating a communications session recovered type event instance on the team member device when the communication is restored between the team member and teamed devices; (5) the communications session recovered type event being sent directly or via a queue of events which drives the synchronous operations of the application to the application event processing unit which handles recovered communications sessions; (6) the event processing unit of the application then causing the team member device to send whatever code, data, and/or content is needed to bring the teamed device into synchronization with the rest of the event driven interoperability application; and (7) the event processing unit of the application then modifying the behavior of the application package to include the now recovered teamed device in the process of carrying out the intent of the application.