Patent ID: 8321337

Claim:
A method of enabling transaction activities by networked computing devices comprising: providing each device being connected to at least one server and associated with at least one stakeholder, wherein each device and each stakeholder has a unique identifier, and wherein a plurality of electronic certificates are provided, each owned by a stakeholder or on behalf of a device, the certificates being held on the at least one server and comprising a data structure which, when interpreted by the at least one server, determines whether a particular device acting on behalf of a particular stakeholder is entitled to carry out a transaction: accessing a relational database from an embedded computing device by way of an appropriate set of commands, wherein the set of commands comprises an enumerable set of parameterized strings of commands each of which is identified with a transaction ID, wherein each transaction ID is identified with two format strings of commands, one of which describes a mapping between data supplied by the embedded computing device and the set of commands, and the other of which describes a mapping between fields returned from the relational database and a format readable by the embedded computing device; associating database operations with first and second format strings held only on the server, wherein the first format string is an input format string containing a list of executable commands that are interpreted when a transaction request is received, each server supplied executable command in the list being an instruction to translate one field of data presented by the embedded computing device in its own native format into a representation that is used to fill in the placeholders and thus to instantiate the template; then passing the executable commands to the relational database as translated executable commands, and wherein the second format string is an output format string containing a list of server supplied commands that are interpreted when data is returned from the database as a result of the executable commands.