Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput – Computer conferencing – Demand based messaging
Reexamination Certificate
1999-04-22
2003-03-04
Jaroenchonwanit, Bunjab (Department: 2152)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput
Computer conferencing
Demand based messaging
C709S241000, C709S203000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06529943
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a server, a client, a client server system, a method for controlling them, and a storage medium therefor.
In particular, this invention relates to a server, a client, a client server system, a method for controlling them, and a storage medium therefor wherein the safety of the server is maintained when a request from the client is embedded into the server.
In addition, this invention relates to a server, a client, a client server system, a method for controlling them, and a storage medium therefor wherein the safety of the server is also maintained when a request from the client is executed.
2. Related Background Art
There are conventionally various client server systems, and in each system, a server provides services to a client.
For example, in an E-mail (hereafter simply referred to as a “mail”) system, in case of transmitting a mail, a mail made on a client machine is sent to a mail server according to a mail protocol such as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).
The mail server sees the destination of the mail to determine the address of a mail server to which a receiver belongs in order to send the mail to this mail server.
Upon receiving the mail, the mail server places the mail in a spool for the receiver. When the receiver uses, for example, the POP3 protocol to access the mail server in order to check the received mail, the mail server obtains the mail from the spool to transmit it to the receiver's client machine.
Such a mail system provides various mail services in addition to mail transmissions and receptions. A filtering function for saving mails to different mail boxes depending on the contents or types of the mail and rejecting the mail reception depending on the mail sender is important to, for example, users who receive a large amount of mails per day.
This filtering function is conventionally executed by a mail application on the client side or is implemented by the mail server executing a filtering program on all mails or mails concerning selected mail addresses.
The realization of the filtering function of the conventional mail system, however, had the following problems. That is, if a mail application executed filtering, even an unwanted mail that was to be deleted remained in the spool on the mail server until the user accessed the mail to shift it to the client machine. Consequently, the disc capacity on the mail server was consumed.
In addition, even with common filtering processing that many users desire to set, settings are required on the mail application of each client.
If a filter program embedded in the mail server carries out filtering, only the supervisor having a supervisor privilege can normally incorporate the filter program into the mail server, whereas users are not free to do so. Even if the supervisor performs this operation, the supervisor's burdens increase.
Furthermore, various filter programs are required to meet users' diverse requirements. Thus, the stability and safety of the filter program cannot be easily maintained, so the stability of the mail system may be degraded.
In addition, as another example of a client server system, the World Wide Web (hereafter referred to as “WWW”) system allows a Web browser acting as a client to access a Web server through the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (hereafter referred to as “HTTP”) in order to obtain pages described using the Hyper Text Markup Language (hereafter referred to as “HTML”) on the Web server. The Web browser can then interpret the contents of the pages to display them on the screen of the client machine.
The WWW system is globally popular, and its powerful link mechanism provides simple accesses to Web servers throughout the world.
On the other hand, the ability to simply access Web servers to display information on the screen has made new problems. For example, children must be protected from harmful information.
Conventionally, to deal with this problem, the Web server transmitted a web page with a note indicating that this was harmful information, or a supervisor registered pages for harmful information in a proxy server to allow the indication of such pages to be determined, or the user registered pages for harmful information in the Web browser to allow the indication of such pages to be determined.
However, in order to recognize harmful pages using the Web browser, a recognition mechanism must be embedded in the Web browser. Criteria with which to determine that the information is harmful vary with the age or trend, so the recognition mechanism must be constantly updated. It takes a large amount of time and labor for individual Web browsers to perform update operations.
In addition, if the proxy server recognizes harmful pages, the supervisor must register such pages depending on individual users' requirements, requiring a large amount of time and labor. In addition, if the Web server limits the obtention of pages and if no user recognition mechanism according to HTTP is used, the client machine can be identified whereas the user using the client machine cannot be identified, so harmful information may not be eliminated appropriately.
A user approval mechanism according to HTTP enables the user to be approved, but to achieve this requires this mechanism to be enabled on the Web server. Harmful-information senders rarely enable the user to approve, the fact that may reduce the information access frequency, so this is neither effective means.
As described above, despite its ability to execute processing according to a certain protocol, the conventional client server system cannot appropriately implement more flexible functions and services that attentively meet users' needs.
Extension of the protocol may enable some of these services to be implemented, but such extension must be very large in order to meet users' diverse requests and it is difficult to create a server program that can cope with all extended portions. In addition, there is a problem that such a server program is not compatible with conventional server programs.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a server, a client, a client server system, a method for controlling them, and a storage medium therefor wherein the server can safely execute a request from the client.
In particular, it is an object of this invention to provide a server, a client, a client server system, a method for controlling them, and a storage medium therefor wherein before providing a service to the client, the server publishes part of its information and functionality to the client so that the client can create a request for a service based on the published information and so that the server can then safely execute the request.
To attain these objects, this invention has the following configuration.
A server according to this invention is characterized by comprising:
request receiving means for receiving a request from a client;
judging means for determining whether the request received by the request receive means is invalid;
embedding means for embedding the request that has not been determined to be invalid into processing executed by the server; and
executing means for executing the processing into which the request has been embedded by the embedding means.
The judging means is preferably characterized in that before executing the processing into which the request has been embedded, the judging means redetermines Whether the request is invalid.
The server is preferably characterized by further comprising information transmitting means for transmitting the predetermined information from the server to the client.
The server is preferably characterized in that:
the request receiving means receives as the request a request program in a program form, in that:
the judging means determines whether the received request program is invalid, and in that:
the embedding means embeds the request program that has not been determined to be invalid into the processing executed by the server.
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Canon Kabushiki Kaisha
Fitzpatrick ,Cella, Harper & Scinto
Jaroenchonwanit Bunjab
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