Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for detecting shoplifting or theft, particularly in a retail environment, using radio-frequency identification (“RFID”). Preferred embodiments leverage RFID tags on merchandise and RFID data that is written at the point of sale on the merchandise-borne RFID tags themselves, on the customer's receipt, or both. Some embodiments also leverage RFID tags on customer identification or “loyalty” cards. After writing RFID data on the merchandise-borne tags and/or receipt, a matching operation is performed at an RFID reader when the shopper and his merchandise exit the premises, in order to determine whether the shopper has paid for the items in his possession.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and computer program products are disclosed for dynamically integrating software resources (such as web services and other back-end software resources) using the services of a content framework (such as a portal platform). A portlet model is leveraged to allow programmatic portlets to serve as proxies for web services, thereby extending portlets beyond their traditional visual role. A deployment interface and a system interface are described for these portlet proxies. The deployment interface is used for composing new web services, and a composition tool is described. The system interface allows for run-time management of the web services by the portal platform. The service provider for a particular function may be bound to the portlet proxy at development time or at run-time.

Abstract: A technique, system, and computer program for enhancing performance of a computer running a multithreaded server application. A scheduling heuristic is defined for optimizing the number of available threads. This heuristic alleviates over-scheduling of worker threads by defining a technique to wait to assign an incoming request to a currently-executing thread (upon completion of the thread's current work), instead of awakening a blocked thread for the incoming request. Provision is made to ensure no thread waits too long. Two stages are associated with a passive socket, so that a connection is only bound to a worker thread when work arrives for that connection. A new type of socket is defined, for merging input from more than one source and making that merged input available for scheduling. A giveback function is defined, for optimizing assignment of threads to incoming requests when persistent connections are used. Threads that go idle are put onto an idle queue, releasing them from a worker thread.

Abstract: The broker agent asks a facilitator agent to locate a service provider agent which is involved in its own job. The broker agent, upon receiving from a regular agent a message packet indicating a request for mediation of a job, analyzes the message packet to judge the outline of the requested job and applies certain conversion to the request message for sending it to the service provider agent which is relevant to the request. The broker agent receives a reply from the service provider agent and sends it to the regular agent after applying certain conversion.