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Morfik Patents AJAX Compiler

Posted by Hemos on from the i-am-patenting-newspaper-delivery-as-well dept.

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."

3 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. My First Thought by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:My First Thought by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Surely there's a point where failure to perform due diligence is itself an offense? I mean, come on; anyone in IT could tell them (and could have told them in 2005) that there's a ton of prior art. If I patent "a method of preserving food by keeping it cold" and try to excuse my stupidity by saying that I guess I just didn't do enough research to learn about the prior existence of something called a "refrigerator," would anyone buy it?

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  2. Turing Completeness? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.")