Patent ID: 8346950

Claim:
A hosted application server system, including: a computer readable storage device comprising: an interface for receiving a request from one of a plurality of users; a runtime environment for running a plurality of independently authored applications, at least two of the applications being written in different programming languages; a shared data model; a core configured to receive and respond to a request from one of the independently authored applications for a content object from the shared data model; and an interface for sending a response to the user; wherein the shared data model is accessed and modified by more than one of the plurality of independently authored applications and stores data comprising: a plurality of object types, an object type having a plurality of attributes that define data structure of a content object to which the object type corresponds, wherein one or more object types are user defined, and a plurality of user-contributed content objects, wherein: each user-contributed content object is associated with at least one of the object types, has data structured according to that object type, and is designated as being either publicly available to users other than a user who contributed the object or privately available only to the user who contributed the object, at least one of the user-contributed content objects is accessed by different ones of the plurality of independently authored applications, and at least one of the user-contributed content objects has a user attribute identifying the user who contributed the content object to the shared data model.