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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 07:42 PM EDT |
The "like nothing that ever existed before" question is really a patent type
question not a copyright question. Which rather goes to prove the point really.
Copyrights don't naturally fit APIs. Copyrights don't cover ideas and APIs are
nothing but named ideas.
- API = named idea.
- API name and
syntax = the interface between humans and computers. The name and syntax are
functional and fixed because computers are absolutely literal.
- API
Specification = a precise description of the named idea in human language.
- API Implementation = code to tell a computer how to do perform the
activity described by the named idea.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 09:07 PM EDT |
The Java way of opening an Internet connection,
import
java.net.Socket;
...
new Socket("domain.name", portNumber);
...
is a lot better than the C way:
#include
<arpa/inet.h>
...
struct sockaddr_in server;
int
sockfd;
resolve("domain.name", (char *)&server.sin_addr);
sockfd=socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
server.sin_family=AF_INET;
((unsigned char*)(&(server.sin_port)))[0]=portNumber>>8;
((unsigned char*)(&(server.sin_port)))[1]=portNumber;
if
(connect(sockfd,
(struct sockaddr *)&server,
sizeof(server))==-1) {
error1...;
}
...
I
have no idea who came up with the simpler version of this API, but somewhere
someone did all us Java programmers a favor. Is this to say there's some
creativity somewhere in the Java API? Yes, but I don't know if was Sun's
doing. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 03:08 AM EDT |
> Where has there been a single piece of evidence
> that there is anything novel or
> creative in the Java API?
There's two ways to look at this question.
On the technical level, even Java's original designers would admit no, Java's
novelty
was taking a lot of pre-existing Good Ideas and putting them all in one place
and
making them accessible.
However on business/competitive/marketing level, Java's single big innovation
was
"Write Once, Run Anywhere".
While the reality was never as good as the slogan, Android was the first time
there
was a major division in the Java ecosystem that programmers actually used. *And,
regardless of the law, that's what Oracle is pissed about.*[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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