Patent ID: 8301783

Claim:
A method for efficiently serializing navigational state in a Portal, wherein said Portal is running in a server system, wherein said server system includes a communication component which allows communication between said Portal and a client browser via a communication channel, wherein said Portal determines a layout of a requested Portal page, invokes rendering of page elements belonging to said Portal page, and transmits said Portal page to the client browser for displaying, wherein at least one page element of said Portal page provides a link comprising functionality for initiating rendering of a new page or a new page element by said Portal, wherein each user interaction by clicking said link at said at least one page element generates a new navigational state of said Portal, wherein said new navigational state describes a current view of said Portal as a result of all previous navigational interactions of a particular client, wherein in response to a client request for a new Portal page said new navigational state is encoded in a serialized form into one of each uniform resource location (URL) or into a header of the new Portal page, wherein said method comprises the following two sub-processes: a first stream-based serialization sub-process being hierarchy-oriented that uses a hierarchical object representation of said new navigational state and transforms the new navigational state into a series of events, wherein said events in said series of events serve as input for a selection of strategies for compacting information that is associated with the events, wherein at an end of said sub-process compacted navigational state information carried by said events is transformed into a character-based representation of said navigational state information and a hierarchical structure of said new navigational state is derived from an order of said events and transformed into an additional character-based representation of said navigational state information both character-based representations being directly streamed to said second sub-process, a second stream-based serialization sub-process being hierarchy-independent that uses a result of said first stream-based serialization sub-process and applies a plurality of further compression and character encoding strategies and finally streams compressed and character encoded information into one of a URL and header of said new Portal page, wherein both sub-processes are linked together.