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Authored by: darrellb on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 03:15 PM EDT |
The fully-qualified names are the Organization.
Structure is the naming hierarchy used to group the organization
into something other than a long list of names. Sequence is the order into
which the Organization is arranged other than arbitrarily.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 03:51 PM EDT |
"Structure" and "Organization" are both technical requirements for
compatibility. (i.e. which classes are in which packages, what names and
parameter lists each method has... there is exactly ONE way to do this which is
compatible with the Java platform programmers are used to.
"Sequence" is a
little more muddy... If you have a source file with a Java class implementation
in it, what order should the methods appear in? It doesn't actually matter, so
if Google's code contains these methods in the exact same order as Oracle's
code, then there's no technical requirement to do it that way. However, there's
also not really any element of creativity in it either; its almost arbitrary.
Alphabetical order would be fine for example. The most useful order is probably
to put them in the same order that Oracle's documentation for that class lists
them in; this makes it marginally simpler for programmers looking at Google's
code to easily find the function they want. However: if they did use that
order, then it might end up being the same order as what Oracle's code contains,
because Oracle's documentation is javadoc generated directly from their
implementation source code.
Anyway, giving this ordering any sort of
protection is ridiculous, because there's nothing really creative about it. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 04:00 PM EDT |
The sequence of an API is irrelevant. From the point of view of the programmer,
the sequence of the *documentation* of the API may be significant to help find
the information about a particular function, but from the program's point of
view, it is irrelevant if the the sequence is 'a, b, c' or 'c, b, a' or some
random order. The implementation finds the function wherever it is.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: LouS on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 09:06 PM EDT |
There is no order to methods in an API any more than there is an order to
words
in the English language. There is an order to methods in the
documentation of an API and in the code implementing and
API
(just as there is an order to the words in an English
dictionary).
An API is an abstract entity which has no fixed
tangible form, which is why it
is not copyrightable. The judge asked what the
fixed form of an API is, but
the question seems to have gotten lost in the
shuffle. Too bad Google did not
jump up and down and make a big deal of it at
that point.
(There is an order to the parameters of a method in an API but that
is purely
functional.) [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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