Patent Issued

Today I received notice that my name was included on a patent. The process was long, the company actually came and went during the whole process, but still, it happened, it's permanent and it's kinda cool. At least to me...

I'm including a link to the patent details here and I truly don't remember all the ins and outs of the algorithm, but I'll try to describe it here.

The Patent

As a UI developer, I'm always worried about keeping the data I'm showing up to date. Almost all systems require multi-user support and once someone sees stale data or worse, tries to edit it, all heck breaks loose. Your application takes a hit, your users start to feel worried about the data integrity and you'll scramble to try and "fix" it.

From the UI point of view, your widgets, tables, trees, views should be backed by "backing" data in the form of some kind of data model. Processes need to be in place to keep that "backing" data up to date and then your widgets need to react to that data changing and do the right thing. This is usually achieved with some kind of polling or pushing. When done right, your users will be amazed and feel very good about the application.

At Quarry Technologies, a secure router was being developed with a configuration CLI (command line). The UI application would need to latch on to a router and push configuration commands at it. Now what happens if someone were to telnet into the router, get onto the command line and start making configuration changes? The UI would be instantly out of date. The configuration screens and data would be stale. The rules engine for validating configuration changes wouldn't be useful, etc. And what if there were multiple UI's and multiple command line jockeys all going at it. Chaos would ensue! and it did....

How to solve this? What if there was a way for the router to tell everyone interested about configuration changes? After all, the router held that final configuration at all times and insured consistency. So we developed a way for the router to essentially "echo" out to all listeners configuration changes as they were accepted and processed. Now the UI application could setup a listener and process configuration changes coming from the router. This sounds simple enough, but there was more to it than that....you can read the goodies in the patent....but in a nutshell, the ability for our router to intelligently push out a consistent state of its configuration to all listeners was the big deal.

So I guess someday my kids, grandkids, etc. can look me up on Google or whatever the worldwide search engine will be and see my name on a patent. Here's to more to come....