Ex Parte McClenahan

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Sep 30, 2016

13033948 (P.T.A.B. Sep. 30, 2016)

UNITED STA TES p A TENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE
13/033,948 02/24/2011
121363 7590 10/04/2016
Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P.
(Adobe Systems Incorporated)
Intellectual Property Department
2555 Grand Blvd
Kansas City, MO 64108
FIRST NAMED INVENTOR
Weili McClenahan
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450
www .uspto.gov
ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO.
Bl327/ADBS.208946 9864
EXAMINER
JAKOVAC,RYANJ
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
2445
NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE
10/04/2016 ELECTRONIC
Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding.
The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication.
Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the
following e-mail address( es):
IPDOCKET@SHB.COM
IPRCDKT@SHB.COM
kspringer@shb.com
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
Ex parte WEILI MCCLENAHAN
Appeal2015-002778
Application 13/033,948
Technology Center 2400
Before JASON V. MORGAN, MELISSA A. RAAP ALA, and
NABEEL U. KHAN, Administrative Patent Judges.
MORGAN, Administrative Patent Judge.
DECISION ON APPEAL
This is an appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner's Final
Rejection of claims 1, 3, 4, 6-11, 13-15, and 17-23. We have jurisdiction
under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We reverse.
Appeal2015-002778
Application 13/033,948
STATEivIENT OF THE CASE
Invention
The invention relates to scaling of stateful enterprise services. See
Spec. ,-r 1.
Exemplary Claim
1. A method of scaling stateful enterprise services, the
method comprising:
receiving a request for data from an enterprise application;
identifying a received user identifier and a received
service type identifier from the request;
accessing a routing data structure including a plurality of
user entries, each user entry being associated with a user and
having associated user identifier, a service type identifier, an
instance of an enterprise application of a number of instances of
enterprise applications, and a statefulness indicator defining
whether a corresponding enterprise application is a stateful or
stateless application, at least one entry having been created using
information collected from a user;
identifying the instance of the enterprise application in the
routing data structure based on the received user identifier, the
received service type identifier, and the statefulness indicator;
and
routing the request to the identified instance of the
enterprise application.
App. Br. 14, Claims App'x.
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Appeal2015-002778
Application 13/033,948
Rejections
Claims 1, 3, 6, 7, 13, 14, 17, 19 1, and20-23 stand rejected under
35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Aiken (US 2005/0050202 Al,
published Mar. 3, 2005) and Degenkolb (US 2009/0006539 Al, published
Jan. 1, 2009).
Claims 4 and 18 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Aiken, Degenkolb, and Official Notice.
Claims 8-11 and 15 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Aiken, Degenkolb, and Buchwald (US 2009/0133100 Al,
published May 21, 2009).
DISPOSITIVE ISSUE
Did the Examiner err in finding that Aiken teaches a "service type
identifier," as recited in each of the independent claims ( 1, 7, 14, and 21 )?
ANALYSTS
In rejecting claim 1, the Examiner finds the claimed service type
identifier is taught or suggested by Aiken's port identifier of a connection
request (from client to server). See Ans. 4; Adv. Act. 2; Final Act. 4. The
Examiner finds that Aiken's port identifier would have been understood as
identifying a service type (and thus understood as a service type identifier)
because a subset of port numbers are ubiquitously associated with respective
types of service. Ans. 4 ("[P]ort 80 identifies web services while port 21
identifies file transfer protocol (FTP) services[.]").
1 The Examiner does not identify claim 19 in the statement of the rejection.
Final Act. 3. However, the Examiner includes claim 19 in the body of the
rejection. Id. at 5. We hold this typographical error harmless.
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Appeal2015-002778
Application 13/033,948
Appellant argues that Aiken does not use ports as service type
identifiers in the portions cited by the Examiner. Reply Br. 10. In
particular, Appellant argues that "Aiken describes that the combination of an
IP address and a port identifies a particular application." Id. (citing Aiken
i-fi-128 and 54). Appellant argues that Aiken thus uses source IP address,
destination IP address, and destination port triples to ensure that connection
requests are routed to the same application instance. Reply Br. 10.
We agree with Appellant that the Examiner erred. The Examiner is
correct that it was well known that a port number can potentially identify a
particular service. See, e.g., JANA Allocation Guidelines For Values In the
Internet Protocol and Related Headers, Information Science Institute, Univ.
of S. Cal., RFC 2780 § 9.1, Internet Engineering Task Force, available at
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2780 (Mar. 2000). However, the Examiner does
not show that port numbers are used in this manner in the relied upon
portion of Aiken, which is directed to workload balancing techniques that
include the use of a unique listening socket associated with a particular
application instance. See Aiken i1 3 8 (cited by Ans. 4 ). Because the
Examiner does not show that a port used to identify particular application
instances teaches or suggests the port identifying the type of a service, we
agree with Appellant that Aiken fails to teach or suggest the "service type
identifier" recited in each of the independent claims (1, 7, 14, and 21).
Accordingly, we do not sustain the Examiner's 35 U.S.C. § 103(a)
rejection of claims 1, 7, 14, and 21, and claims 3, 4, 6, 8-11, 13, 15, 17-20,
22, and 23, which contain similar recitations and that are similarly rejected.
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Appeal2015-002778
Application 13/033,948
DECISION
The Examiner's decision to reject claims 1, 3, 4, 6-11, 13-15, and
17-23 is reversed.
REVERSED
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