Patent ID: 8146099

Claim:
A method to be executed at least in part in a computing device for implementing a pipeline architecture in a service-oriented system, the method comprising: automatically configuring a user constructed schema; receiving a plug-in associated with the schema; registering the plug-in through metadata, wherein the metadata includes at least one of: an order and a stage of the plug-in; receiving another plug-in; configuring the schema without compilation by registering the other plug-in; analyzing dependency information provided by the metadata to determine an order of the plug-ins and the core platform operations; assigning a budget to a plurality of actions, wherein a portion of the assigned budget is apportioned to each of a plurality of child actions; upon invoking a system method within a plug-in, passing the portion of the budget along with a correlation identifier assigned to each child action; decrementing the budget for each child action to be performed based on a predetermined cost of each operation associated with a child action; if the budget is exhausted, terminating the operations and providing an error message; resetting the decrementing of the budget if a predefined delay is included in an operational sequence associated with an action; and resetting the decrementing of the budget if the action includes a finite tree structure of child actions; and in response to receiving a call for an action from the user, executing the plug-in according to the received order along with one or more core platform operations in an execution pipeline, wherein executing the plug-in includes: passing a request object to the plug-in, such that the plug-in is enabled to manipulate a response object; and passing an arbitrary state associated with the execution to the plug-in.