absolutely is the crux of it, and google raised in evidence.
Compatibility
of other people's programs, libraries and
frameworks which are stacked on top
of each other in what is
called
"dependency ****" in
the trade.
At the root of all those dependances is the java standard
libraries, aka the 37 packages at issue here. If you don't
have an
implementation of those apis then none of those
libraries could be reused on
Android.
**** a non Groklaw suitable term.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
15 years ago, our company (at the time) went through a few
iterations of
attempting to improve the quality of
the software we wrote. One
direction we tested was Java - a
language that I stuck with, even if the
company didn't.
At the time, there was little of the "test-led" development
concept, but Java itself was a massive improvement on
previous languages, in
that it gave you so much checking at
compile-time.
Since then the numerous
3rd-party libraries, such as Joda
and Junit, and the development tools (such as
Eclipse) have
all helped to improve the ease of software development *and*
improve the quality.
That is 15 years where state-of-the-art has leveraged
off
the top of the Java APIs. The point, therefore, that there
is so much 3rd
party stuff that *also* depends on the Java
APIs, but independently adds to the
Java world, is hugely
important to compatibility. Thank you for
mentioning
it!
Of course, when Java was in its infancy, it was leveraging
off the top
of C and C++ in the same way. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|