Patent ID: 7895349

Claim:
A method of transporting a message from a sending application to a receiving application, across a messaging landscape in a collaborative network, the method comprising: defining, by one or more computer systems, an application message having a structured application message header, the structured message header being defined in accordance with a message class of the application message determinative of content and configuration of the message header and in accordance with a messaging protocol of a business application of a collaborative business enterprise, the structured application message header comprising one or more components defined by the protocol and based on the message class with each of the one or more components relating to a corresponding set of attributes of the message, at least one of the one or more components including version information, the version information indicating the protocol used to define the message; sending, by the one or more computer systems, the message according to the protocol; and receiving, at a messaging component in the messaging landscape implemented using at least one of the one or more computer systems, the message, the messaging component being operative to process the message based on the version information included in the message; wherein the message class having one of multiple possible values including: a first value representative of an application-message class associated with application messages that cause specified operations to be performed at the receiving application, a second value representative of an application-response class associated with messages responsive to the application messages of the application-message class, a third value representative of an application-error class associated with error messages indicative of errors occurring at the receiving application processing the application messages and a fourth value representative of a system-acknowledge class associated with acknowledgement messages indicative that one or more application messages have been received by the receiving application.