Transaction dispatcher for a passenger entertainment system, method and article of manufacture

Portions of this patent application contain materials that are subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document, or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office. A computer is used to manage communication over a network between one or more network addressable units and a plurality of physical devices of a passenger entertainment system. The system is configured and operated using software to provide passenger entertainment services including audio and video on-demand, information dissemination, product and service order processing, video teleconferencing and data communication services. The system includes a system server and a network supporting multiple computer processors. The processors and the server comprise application software that control telephony applications and network services. The server is coupled by way of the network to physical devices of the system. The server comprises software that instantiates a network addressable unit server that interfaces to one or more network addressable units, that instantiates a services server that interfaces to one or more service clients that provide services of the passenger entertainment system, and that instantiates a router and one or more mail slots comprising a lookup table that identify each of the clients. Data comprising a network routing address and a physical device type are used to access the lookup table to determine message destinations. The respective servers interface to their clients by way of named pipes that translate messages from a first format to a second format. The server also comprises software that instantiates intranodal thread processors that route messages between processes on the physical devices and the one or more service clients to route services of the passenger entertainment system to the processes on the physical devices.