Patent ID: 8233411

Claim:
A service broker system for mediating events or messages to be sent to or received from a plurality of applications to control service interaction and to provide service blending in a communications system that supports service interaction/blending for services that include communication services and web services, the service broker system comprising: a plurality of steplet functional components individually implemented using at least one processor and configured to designate another steplet functional component to execute as a successor to itself, at least one of the steplet functional components including logic that determines a desired mediation to provide feature interaction or service blending associated with an event or message; a sharing component implemented using the at least one processor and configured to share information related to individual events or message between the steplet functional components; and a receiving component implemented using the at least one processor and configured to receive the events or messages, to associate the contents of the events or messages with the information sharing means, and to designate which steplet functional component will execute initially for each event or message, the receiving component comprising a message manager component configured in response to one or more events or incoming messages, the message manager component comprising a dispatcher for the steplet functional components, wherein the message manager component creates and maintains a unique message object for a received request message, the message object comprising information bound to the message including a list of steplet functional components for execution and any desired attributes.