Slashdot Mirror
Morfik Patents AJAX Compiler
MikeyTheK writes "It appears that under the radar, the USPTO granted Morfik a patent for the "System and method for synthesizing object-oriented high-level code into browser-side javascript". Reading further, it appears that they have patented the compiling of high-level languages into AJAX apps. The high-level languages include "Ada, C, C++, C#, COBOL, ColdFusion, Common Lisp, Delphi, Fortran, Java, Object Pascal, SmallTalk, Visual Basic, and Visual Basic.NET". It would appear that the application date is September, 2005."
My first thought was, "Is Google Web Toolkit prior art or infringement?" After a bit of looking around, it seems this patent was filed on September 5, 2006 while GWT 1.0 was released in May 2006. Sorry Morfik, but your patent is invalid. (Thank God, too. This patent appears to be overreaching and far too broad. It could prevent an entire industry from developing.)
:)
All I can say is: where was your due diligence, Morfik? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to spend time and money on filing a patent that will be useless to you after it's granted. The best they could do is scare a few Open Source projects into submission. Anyone with a vested interest in the technology is going to do the due diligence that Morfik didn't, and take the matter to court.
The only "out" they have available is to show evidence that they disclosed the inner workings of their JST product prior to GWT being released. In which case they might have protection from the "one year to file" rule. Maybe. Or maybe they're just trying to carry out this threat in a laughably oversimplified fashion. (They're lawyers must be telling them it won't work?) Go figure.
For those who are unaware of what GWT is, it's basically a toolkit that takes Java programs and converts them down to Javascript. By coding Java to the GWT toolkit*, you gain all the benefits of the Java compiler and type checking without sacrificing the ability to deploy on browsers that do not have Java installed. I'd rather code in Javascript myself, but it has its place.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Then maybe the patents aren't such a bad thing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
I swear, I will set fire to the first bastard to reply to this article with "dur dur... I'm going to patent blank"!
April Fools Day is over.
* From the redudant department of redundancy.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Of course it is technically possible to do anything in Javascript. But can this technology do any task which is actually complex enough that it wouldn't be easier to just port it manually, at anything like reasonable speed?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
It's more like 'a job someone had to do'.
Trust me, I work for the government.
Shouldn't any technology like this be immediately unpatentable? All this does is translate code in one Turing-complete language to another. Since this transformation is mathematically proven to be possible for all Turing-complete languages, this is merely an algorithm and should be unpatentable...
(I know, they'd approve a patent on cheese if you worded it as "a method for transforming milk and bacteria into edible food product.")
I just love it when crap lines up like that...
So I have to make up buzzwords like "AJAX" to get patents for existing technologies like Javascript?
I really love those buzzfolks who hide behind words instead competency and their impact on the combined human intelligence.
"where was your due diligence, Morfik? "
That's an easy let out for the patent office isn't it? It's the patent office that's avoiding checking the prior art and obviousness clauses of patent law. i.e. its the patent office that won't do it's f***ing job.
This fast track patent is just a trick to legally not do their work and pass the blame to someone else. But the patent office created the current mess and they should fix it.
Aha, Python's not on the list!
Must be too high-level.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
There is not a patent here. This is a published application. Filed in 2006, not 2005, with priority to 2005 through a provisional application, which almost gives it the same level of priority as if it were file in 2005. Someone wake me up WHEN this gets issued and not when it is just an application that quite possibly hasn't even been viewed yet. (USPTO has almost a 3 yr backlog in some arts.)
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
What will the reflection of that patent or whatever is going to be on ajax ?
Read radical news here
...just don't use OOP. I always wanted to see a relational GUI anyhow (using dynamic relational, not Oracle-like static stuff).
Table-ized A.I.
Since when is ColdFusion a high-level language? Just because they use it in MySpace?
The definition of a compiler seems to differ from person to person, but the best one is something that reads a stream of input, converts it into a richer internal representation (usually a tree but it doesn't have to be), and writes out a different stream based on this internal representation.
Even here in 2007, some people still seem to think the only thing that can be called a compiler is something that takes source code and emits binary code, but that's just one specific special case. The same basic principles that GCC uses will be used by PovRAY to compile its scene language into an image, ignoring the raytracing part. (That is, setting up the internal representation of the scene is just like a compiler.) Compiling C# into IL uses the same basic techniques. Defining anything that uses standard compiler techniques as a compiler is the motivation for my preferred definition.
Given the long history of compilers, and the sheer profusion of them, I really don't think that compilers ought to be patentable anymore. Compiling Java into Javascript isn't a novel idea, it's "just" some engineering by somebody who understands compilers. (Which the recent "Wasabi" uproar over Joel on Software's posting proved is not all that many people, but still, it's simple once you see the tricks.) The only even remotely tricky part of such a compilation is if there's no easy way to get the syntax tree directly from the language parser, and that's still just engineering. There's definitely plenty of copyrightable stuff in such a compiler, but it'd take something very, very novel for it to be patentable.
(Note I'm writing this message as if I weren't entirely against software patents, which I am, at length. This is written from the putative point of view of the patent system; even then, compilers generally aren't that novel an idea. Saying "with a compiler!" is up there with "on the internet!" for novelty.)
Sorry, compilers and code translators have been around for a long time. Look at claim 2, aren't comments generally removed from program source code when generating an AST? There's nothing novel in the first 5 claims, claim 6 is obvious and the remainder are just silly. I'm offended these guys had the gaul to even file this.
It seems like every time we hear about a patent application on Slashdot it's usually followed up with lots of evidence of prior art, be it Google's Web Toolkit or something else. The US Patent and Trademark office doesn't have the manpower or expertise to thoroughly research every patent submission which seems to embolden schmucks to patent things they shouldn't or couldn't if there were competent safeguards in place. That being the case, let's "slsashdot" Congress with petitions to enact penalties ranging from administrative fees for honest mistakes to criminal charges -- and jail time for egregious offenders -- for frivolous applications in cases where someone is clearly in the wrong in filing for a patent. As long as there is no possibility of punishment to deter a flood of patents in the hopes of suing for royalties, this crap is only going to get worse.
is here.
Regards,
Kilgore Trout
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
For all the handwaving and buzzwords in the application, it converts code written in language foo into language bar. That's a compiler. Now if they want to patent (copyright's possibly more appropriate?) their specific individual implementation of a compiler, then let them get on with it. If they want to patent compilers as a concept they can stuff it and I don't think they have a hope.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Yeah, haha, Hemos, you almost had me! OMG PONIES!!!1!! Very clever April Fool's joke! And for the USPTO to be in on it... Wow. Best one yet!
This is yet another argument for creating a large "ecosystem" of valuable GPL3 code: lock vendors who abuse patents out of this ecosystem. Companies can still keep their intellectual property to themselves: private and proprietary data used with GPL3 code.
As a consultant, I always try to sell my customers on going open source, if it makes sense for their situation. Open source == cost savings.
For as smart as the people on Slashdot are, it continually surprises me to see just how bad people are missing the boat in terms of what a patent application such as this means. Seriously, discussion here might be elevated from ridiculous to meaningful if everybody would just keep in mind the following things:
1. The title of a patent does not describe the scope of what the patent will cover. In this example, they are not trying to patent every single "System and method for synthesizing object-oriented high-level code into browser-side javascript." They are trying to patent *one particular, specific system and method* for doing so. That is a big friggin difference. If you read the patent claims, you will see what the patent is actually covering. Summary: People on Slashdot inappropriately freak out when they see a patent title that looks broad and they really ought to know better by now.
2. This is a patent APPLICATION!!! Not an issued patent. When people try to get a patent, they make the claims incredibly broad at first. And then the examiner will make them narrow the claims as they negotiate what the patent actually will cover. In this example, I am going to hazard a guess that the examiner will probably make them throw out claims 1 through 4. And the examiner might let their broadest claim be claim 5. The people trying to get this patent KNOW that this is what will happen during this process--it is how things are done! I am astounded that the people on Slashdot have not picked up on this yet. Summary: Just because a patent application has incredibly broad claims, that does not mean 1) that the patent will issue that way, or 2) that the people applying for the application realize that what they are in their application claiming is too broad.
Get with it, people! I hope that reading this may take the discussion here from "Patents suxkzorz!!" to "Well, claim 1 looks way to broad because of $somePriorArt . . . but the method described in claim 5 . . . hmmm, I don't know that I've ever heard of anything that does it that way exactly."
Here's to hoping, anyway!
In this case, the application was filed September 5, 2006. Thus, the application filing date is September 5, 2006. However, the application claims priority to a provisional application filed September 6, 2005. Thus, the application has a priority date of September 6, 2005. This difference is important for 35 U.S.C. 102(e) purposes.
Under 35 U.S.C. 102(e), a prior filed U.S. patent or application can be used as "prior art" against a currently filed application. As an example, suppose Application A was filed on March 1, 2006 that discloses each and every limitation of claim 1 of the current application. Application A could then be used under 35 U.S.C. 102(e) as "prior art" to reject claim 1 because it has an earlier filing date (application date) than the current application. However, the Applicant of the current application could then rely on the priority date of the provisional application, which is September 6, 2005, to overcome the rejection. In this case, the Examiner would then have to go back to the provisional application to which the current application claims priority, and determine, whether, in fact, the provisional application discloses the subject-matter claimed by claim 1. As an additional comment to 35 U.S.C. 102(e), I briefly add that it is common for an Examiner to reject a claim in view of a reference that qualifies as "prior art" under 35 U.S.C. 102(e), where the reference is used with other art under 35 U.S.C. 103(a).
Hence, there is a difference between filing dates and priority dates, and these two dates need not always be the same. So, to say that these application has a filing date of September 5, 2006 would be correct, but then to say that this application has a priority date of September 6, 2005 would also be correct.
The opinion expressed herein does not represent the views of any government or private organization.
I guess now I am forced to to port all of my FORTRAN AJAX apps over to Perl
"System and method for synthesizing object-oriented high-level code into browser-side javascript"
:P
I suck at english, I really don't "get" what they're patenting here, a code translator or something ? Code your webpage in "MorfikLang++" and it will automagically translate into Javascript, so you can do double the debugging plus pay licensing/royalties for something everyone else has been doing natively for a couple years
I don't see this as affecting AJAX at all. AJAX is just a catchphrase that seems to group any functionality that doesn't result in a page reload, hopefully involving meaningful data exchange with the server. Hell, lots of people falsely believe that prototype.js == AJAX.
Besides, if they were really trying to patent AJAX, don't you think Google would play musical court chairs with them until little miss Morfik runs out of seed money ? The system is broken, that's for sure, but it's broken in favor of whoever has more money. Who the hell has more money than Google and MS ? (Bad Boy) Noooooooobody!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Related to prior art: there were already discussions about this subject when the GWT v.s. Morfik case emerged a few months back. The Morfik toolkit itself is in development for over six years now (at least) so one should seek evidence prior 2000, I suppose. And AFAIS Morfik's patent involves not only the fact of "translation" ("what") but also the method (the "how") that they call JST (JavaScript Synthesis Technology). I will be looking into the Morfik patent from this technical perspective and through the looking glass of a convert Morfik developer, as soon as I can at piBlog (http://www.pannonrex.com/blog).
This article is so 2006. :-)
http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=196 explains the patent back in 2006. No, Morfik didn't copy it. They even hypothetically showed it to Google before GWT was released.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
No, they didn't. GMail was built all on their own. GWT is a company they bought and open-sourced.
.js file from the server, etc.
Their kitchen sink demo looks superficially like GMail, which may contribute to the confusion, but this is probably just to demonstrate that you could build a GMail-like app with it. If you look at what is generated, it's completely different: GMail uses frames, doesn't load a
(That's not to say that this patent makes any sense; we've been building X-to-Y compilers for decades, and have prior art out the wazoo.)
I worked for b-process.com in 2001 and we implemented exactly this in Java. I also have done similar stuff in PHP since then. It's nothing new.
They are obviously not lawyers, and their lawyers must be bad too. Just like your grammar.
If one is going to compile code to an "executable" form, in this case java script, why does it actually matter what form it is. Why not compile it to java?
Trying to answer my own questions the relevant issues are:
1) is the size of the javascript smaller or larger?
2) is java faster or slower for sophisticated operations?
I don't actually know which will be true. While normally i'd expect java to be faster than an interpered language, it's not so obvious for code sent across the web. While simple things like loops will be faster in Java, maybe more sophistcated operations like spawning a new web page will be faster in javascript. Javascript can for example embed a very sophisticated operation--for example "sort"-- into just as few characters, and it will execute at the speed of optimized c-code native to the platform. Javabyte code must encode the whole sort and will execute at the speed of the java interpreter.
3) perhaps the virtue of compileing to javascript is that it's nominally easier for humans to modify
4) is java not as cross platform portable these days compared to java script?
5) are their functions in javascript not available to java?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The patent might make it through the USPTO. I doubt it will hold up in court vs Google or Microsoft.
Regardless, as a potential developer of Morfik-based applications, I have just crossed them off my list. I avoid dealing with companies that compete through the courtroom (with obvious patents) rather than on their product's merits.
I think it is more than hypothetical about showing to Google. "Morfik is tight-lipped about GWT, as they are apparently still under NDA obligations." http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/morfik_ajax_p latform.php/. So I would read this as saying Google contacted Morfik and signed an NDA with them sometime in 2005 to look at what they were doing before they released GWT in 2006.
If one is going to compile code to an "executable" form, in this case java script, why does it actually matter what form it is. Why not compile it to java?
Because every browser has a roughly adequate JavaScript interpreter that is integrated with page rendering.
Like most compilers, things like GWT adapt programmer brains to the execution environment.
It's not JavaScript. It's ECMAScript, and your JavaScript terp just happens to run it properly.
This flies in the face of science.
I think Microsoft had prior art as early as 1998. http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0498/cutting0498.asp
Because every browser has a roughly adequate JavaScript interpreter that is integrated with page rendering.
Are you saying that in this day and age that most computers and their browsers don't support a cross platform java sandbox? Surely we are not still living in the early 90s.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Back in 1996 we were using a developer kit from IBM on their VisualAge C compiler for OS/2 that let us write client side Javascript dynamically. It wasn't called Ajax back then but it's definitely prior art.
I will file two patent applications:
1. "A method for doing something"
2. "A method for doing nothing"
Whatever you do, you will have to pay.
Thomas
All I have to think of is the current progress of the pypy interpreter. They have the ability to take something that is written in RPython and translate it into any backend to the annotator. This currently supports JS among other things. Check out http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/news.html
The Slashdot submitter got it wrong. The patent says "Filed: September 5, 2006". That is, 2006.
Go read for yourself. Come on, you know you want to.
blank© was copyrighted several years ago, the license to use it is only $5 per letter. $7 if in bold or italics.
Deleted
It doesn't matter whether they (or anybody) used it before then. The patent system does not reward invention, it rewards disclosure.
If you invent something and you don't disclose it fully and publicly, you lose your right to use your invention if someone else patents it. That's what the patent system is intended to accomplish.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
I don't own any patents, and don't claim to know much about them, but I think I have a solution to them.
Just have someone show a working invention to the people at the patent office. That will be patented. You want to spur innovation? Maybe rewarding people AFTER they innovate might be better than to reward them after they have submitted nothing but paper and ink?
Just a thought.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Not only specific "HighLevel to Javascript" compiler like GWT could be similar, but the whole concept seems to be pretty old.
Isn't this a very specific subcase of all "translating" compilers that compile some highlevel into some other similarly- or not quite so- high level language (instead of compiling highlevel language into assembly / bytecode) ?
Thoses have been around for years.
As recently Pugs - the perl 6 to haskell/perl 5 (and parrot intermediate representation for lower level) translator.
Or to cite a classical exemple : some early C++ implementation that worked by translating the C++ into plain C, and some of the first Fortan and Pascal language open-source support that worked by feeding C translation into gcc.
Or to give the most trivial and widely used exemple : bison (or yacc) and flex (or lex) that translate a set of grammatical and lexical rules into C code.
Or all those new modern GUI tools (like glade or qtc, etc.) that translate GUI-specific XML into C or C++ code ready to be compiled into the application.
My uncle used to give lectures about such language translation compiler more than 15 years ago.
This patent looks to me like "we defined a very specialised subcase that use javascript as its target and decided to file a patent".
Yes maybe in 2005, when they started filing the patent, nobody has specifically published previous similar compiler. But if that's the case, there much more chance that nobody did it because it seemed to be a trivial consequences of what had been done for ages and thus nobody considered it publication-worthy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nothing to see here, the examnier hasn't even looked at it yet. Here's the transaction history:
04-01-2007 Case Docketed to Examiner in GAU
03-08-2007 PG-Pub Issue Notification
10-04-2006 IFW TSS Processing by Tech Center Complete
10-03-2006 Application Return from OIPE
10-03-2006 Application Return TO OIPE
10-03-2006 Application Dispatched from OIPE
10-03-2006 Application Is Now Complete
09-21-2006 Cleared by OIPE CSR
09-19-2006 IFW Scan & PACR Auto Security Review
09-05-2006 Initial Exam Team nn
This application Claims Priority from Provisional Application 60/714,285 filed 09-06-2005
If you have documented prior art, alert the USPTO. An even nastier way to deal with it is to alert Morfik and/or the law firm that filed the application. They are then legally required to notify the USPTO. If they don't notify the USPTO, then there is a very good case that a court would invalidate the patent for failure to disclose relevent prior art. It can work even if the prior art isn't sufficient for rejecting the application.
Here's the address of the firm that filed the app:
William C. Milks, III;RUSSO & HALE LLP
401 Florence Street
Palo Alto, CA 94301
What? Me? Sig?
In 1982 or so I was part of a team translating a metric buttload of METAPLAN (the bastard child of FORTRAN and assembly) into FORTRAN 77. By hand. The bug injection rate was horrendous, the code was diverging. The old code was the only spec and precise translation was proving to be beyond human capacity.
My immediate manager "didn't notice" when after consultations with him (which never happened) I spent a couple of months skunk-working a translator, MP2F77. Once it worked it could be sold to *his* manager. We knew it worked because the translated code worked. *That* feature also managed to sweeten the Customer enough to accept the change in project methodology.
The generated code wasn't real efficient but it had 10 years of Moore's Law to play with, so nobody cared. And it plus-or-minus-epsilon reproduced the previous behavior. We shipped 100% M2F77'd code.
--
phunctor
Check out these guys who seem to be interested in patenting plots for novels.
So at worst, Morfik should recoup its total costs that it risked by pouring them into developing this invention. And even a 100% profit, to promote progress in science and the useful arts. Collectively from the actual infringers, who have themselves poured lots of money into delivering their versions of the invention. I think that means a few thousand infringers have to split the bill to Morfik of under $100K. Which Morfik will need later when someone else with even more prior art shows Morfik is infringing them, and Morfik has to pay it all, but without the people who got out in the first round.
--
make install -not war
Here's the process:
Requiring a Java VM is the new "You need VBRUN300.DLL". i.e. a big fecking "Stay Away!" sign.
Compiling to JavaScript means the process is this:
I read through the whole thing, that this is just a very bad patent. Not bad for people in general. It can't possibly stand up to scrutiny. Its just a bad patent at every level I can think of up to and including "badly written".
Its a bad patent because it is so "obvious". All they've done is to define JavaScript as as a p-code machine and created a (set of) compiler(s) for translating arbitrary programming languages into JavaScript "p-code". They have, in effect, attempted to patent compilers, albeit in a very limited way. Doing this was extrordinarily obvious, so much so that it wouldn't surprise me if there were hundreds of instances of prior art.
This may be one reason why the patent is so badly written. A truly general patent would make claims against all possible programming languages, but this one explicitly does not. Almost every claim is tacked down to a specific list of languages, and that list varies from claim to claim. Worse, none of the claims address some of the most widely used web programming langauges, including Perl, RUBY, Python, and PHP. My guess is that either (1) the patent was written by an amateur or (2) that these list variations reflect what they were able to find in their search of prior art. The mere existence of variations in the claims is probably evidence of the obviousness of this patent.
As for prior art, we've already seen claims of prior art in IBM (1996) and Microsoft (1998) products. That doesn't surprise me at all. I can recall discussing use of a JavaScript translator for an Ajax-like project I was in involved with (at IBM Research) in 1996. We didn't actually do it while I was on the project, but it was an option, and certainly not one that anyone would have believed was in any sense patentable. Appearance of such code in VisualAge during that same time frame would be anything but surprising. That is, for instance, the same time frame in which Mike Cowleshaw is translating REXX into Java p-code while retaining the interpretability of the REXX.
There are so many other examples of this kind of machine code translation, going all the way back to the original Fortran. I don't see a chance that this patent will hold up to scrutiny.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
Hmmm, interesting - they acknowledge the existence of S2 (LiveJournal's templating language - translated to Perl before execution) and the JavaScript-outputting backend thereof, which apparently predates the first patent application by a year (but is only really a PoC). IANAL, but I suspect this may narrow the applicability of the patent somewhat - I suggest you take a look at that part of the patent...
1.) This process is generally regarded as 'generating' rather than compiling. Compiling implies that something is transferred into a lower level language for speed and better runtime integration. Here it's the opposite. Thus: Generating. The servlet (or whatever) does it is generically refered to as 'generator'. Compiling is the wrong term.
2.) Prior Art. Tons of it. Laszlo and a bunch of other generators have been doing this for years. This patent won't even last a month. To many big players involved in RIA to let it pass. It's about as long lasting (and as silly) as the famous Gary Larson 'Chicken hung by a helium balloon floating into a pub full of Samurai'. Nothing new here, move on.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Doesn't that qualify as "cruel and unusual punishment"? :-)
Are you saying that in this day and age that most computers and their browsers don't support a cross platform java sandbox?
Of course they theoretically support it. Do they have it? If they do, is the startup time for a person with their browser under 500 ms?
Until the answer to both those questions is yes for 95% or more of typical web users, client-side Java is of no use to me in the places where I'd use GWT.
The preferred term is a matter of perspective. In the end, programs written in JavaScript are interpreted, much as programs that have been compiled to p-code are interpreted by the p-code machine. In the interests of making this as clear as possible, consider the following statement of the relevant process:
This patent claims to have done something new, but it seems clear it claims nothing even marginally innovative. All they are doing is translating code to an intermediate form that resides on a server and is then interpreted in a client browser. Substitute any language you prefer for Java. Substitute any language you like for JavaScript. Substitute any intermediate form you like for p-code. The result is the same. There is absolutely nothing in this patent that is not derivative of prior art. They are attempting to patent a design pattern for a restricted set of languages, but that design pattern has been used many times before and in many different computer languages, including all of the languages they make specific claims for.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
How do you know? The summary states that
It is NOT the summary that matters, but the claims. Claim 10 reads consisting of Ada, C, C++, C#, COBOL, ColdFusion, Common Lisp, Delphi, Fortran, Java, Object Pascal, SmallTalk, Visual Basic, and Visual Basic.NET, as do claims 11, 12, 16, 17 and 18. None of the claims read "langauges include".
They admit that someone has produced a S2 to javascript complier, but then try to weasel out saying
In any event, this approach has various limitations, namely, it is only a "proof of concept" and has not been developed to a stage that could be considered useful, and it only compiles from S2 to core JavaScript. The key feature that would make this useful, i.e., client-side JavaScript, is not present. The developer stated: "This would need some additional . . . hooks into the javascript event model before starting to be useful." A compiler that outputs to core JavaScript, though valuable as an academic exercise, lacks commercial usefulness as the code must then run in an isolated system. The ability to output to client-side (or server-side) JavaScript, which allows it to interact with input and output mechanisms, is the key to making it a commercially viable product.; This is quoated from the application.
To me it looks like a slam dunk denial of application. Just because something is not "commercially viable" does not preclude the prior art. The S2 author plainly stated that it would require more work to be useful, i.e. hooks into the javascript event model.
Another booboo, All current server-side technologies are based on scripting languages. Does this mean that my cc processing application written in C++ does not exist?
BWP
Ok, we have to live with software patents for the time being, but the enforcement authority is just out of line. We need lobbyists to put up the pressure on the patent office to ensure that generic classes of problems are not so easily patented.
This type of forward patenting is not of benefit to anyone, least of all Morfic, since such a train will simply reduce developer comfort when selecting technologies such as AJAX. As a developer, I'll say 'sod it' and go ahead with using something like GWT, however the odds are my employer will taboo it. This is not the way forward and it really gets my metaphorical-knickers in a twist.
I read that Microsoft held a patent on mashalling objects into XML. I usually ignore this and will go head with using an off the shelf XML writer, however I shouldn't have to feel that using such a general purpose solution will be infringing a copyright. It's not on!
It feels as though our patent office hosts a bunch of morons who will white stamp anything coming in before them. When this can have such an impact on the whole field of software development, it's simply WRONG.
Perhaps we should have a committee of forward thinkers who sit back and GPL every conceivable idea before Greedy Joe has had a chance to claim it as his own. It sickens me.
I'm now going to file a patent against generation of Javascript Basic from all high level languages which are currently mentioned in every other patent.