Patent ID: 8141125

Claim:
A method of applying a policy to a request, comprising: acquiring a request by one of receiving and intercepting the request; determining at least one policy to be applied to the request, the at least one policy including a plurality of conditions and a plurality of actions associated therewith; based at least in part on the plurality of conditions and the plurality of actions associated with the at least one policy, passing control of evaluation and enforcement of the at least one policy to an associated container, wherein the associated container comprises at least one of: a workflow engine, a rule set engine, or language engine; and applying the at least one policy to the request using a common policy model framework implementing the associated container, wherein the common policy model framework is configured to handle the evaluation and the enforcement of the at least one policy across multiple disparate systems by implementing a common language comprising multiple languages, the common policy model framework further being configured such that a determination of an appropriate language and a setting of an appropriate context is done for each condition to be evaluated and each corresponding action to be executed in the at least one policy, the common policy model framework further providing for passing of control and values of the at least one policy for evaluation of a condition and execution of a corresponding action to the determined language, the at least one policy operable to be applied to the request without evaluating each condition and executing each action contained therein; wherein a combination of at least two of a business process language, a rule set language, and another programming language is used to apply the at least one policy.