Morfik Defends IP Rights Against Google 99
ReadWriteWeb writes "Today Morfik came out fighting in defense of its product JST (Javascript Synthesis Technology). Morfik has implied that Google infringed its IP by releasing Google Web Toolkit (GWT) a couple of weeks ago. The reason? GWT bore more than a casual resemblance to Morfik's JST, which allows developers to use a high-level language of choice and have it compiled to JavaScript. GWT is similar, being a Java-to-Javascript translator. These Javascript compiler products are increasingly necessary for companies like Google, with the high use of Ajax on today's Web and the associated complexity of programming in Javascript."
Sure.. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no associated complexity with programming in JavaScript. There's lack of progress in the language (still no native support of ECMA4 in browser, shame that *Flash* comes with ECMA4 implementation in just two months, before browsers do).
JS synthesis is a hack anyway. I've seen the code produced by such technologies, and it's crap. You trust your application's well being to the compiler authors with the hope they update it when it breaks in the latest and greatest browser out there.
The correct way to me is upgrading the JavaScript language itself, and until then, using native JS libraries that can be readily reviewed and edited.
JS as a language isn't so primitive as to require a Java or C++ compiler to write good and clean code for it.
Re:Sure.. (Score:2, Troll)
Which makes me wonder why google released the toolkit, given that it could help their competitors.
Google are always on the lookout for sources of meta information about sites they search. Is it possible that the toolkit snaffles information from the compilation
Re:Sure.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Where's your tinfoil hat
If this was the case we'd know about it: the "compiled" code it pretty easy to open and read (even if it's still a JS spaghetti mess of a code). No info can be hidden inside.
They do it for two reasons:
1. PR: after few screw ups, like the google's China service, google's "omg ms doesn't put us default in ie7" rants and so on, they needed a bit of a good image in the community to restore they non-evil status
2. they get thousands of free betatesters world-wide to help them point out flaws in their code, which then they'll use in THEIR OWN applications.
Re:Sure.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Ever heard of steganography [wikipedia.org]? I'm not saying they do it, but it absolutely can be done. For example, names of generated variables, functions, etc. can bear (encrypted) information.
-Noam.
Re:Sure.. (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure.. (Score:1)
Re:Sure.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sure.. (Score:1)
Well, Javascript itself is a hack. So is Ajax, for that matter. It is an attempt to turn a client application designed to browse static web pages (remember those, from the dark ages of the 1990s?) into a dynamic client based web application, something it was never really meant to do.
I find it ironic that normally scripting languages are considered high level languages that are easy to develop in, but with Javascript we actually have libraries that attempt to force code
Re:Sure.. (Score:1)
There's no associated complexity with programming in JavaScript. There's lack of progress in the language (still no native support of ECMA4 in browser, shame that *Flash* comes with ECMA4 implementation in just two months, before browsers do).
I disagree.
Javascript is complex due to it's idiosynchroses due it's weird mix of functional LISP-like features and half-baked OO constructs (prototype) which means that (for instance) the "this" keyword has strange properties [quirksmode.org] which, although well-documentated, m
Re:Sure.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Word.
There just *is no* decent environment for doing this kind of stuff (Ajax/DOM). I was actually impressed with V
Re:Sure.. (Score:2)
Godo thing at least Flash 9 got the right idea.
Re: Generated code quality (Score:1)
Compared to GWT, the generated code is beautiful...
http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=121 [nikhilk.net]
Re:Sure.. (Score:2)
JS as a language isn't so primitive as to require a Java or C++ compiler to write good and clean code for it.
It's not about how primitive JS is; it's about people wanting to write object-oriented code. Object orientation in JavaScript leaves a lot to be desired. For proof: I suggest you take a look at 99.9% of JavaScript libraries, which extend the JavaScript language to make it seem more OO.
Ownership? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they think that Google could have actually copied their idea in such a short time, then they are admitting that they had no competitive advantage outside the recourse of litigation. More likely, they developed it concurrently. Google has been making fat web pages as they call them for some time now and I imagine that GWT started as a tool for inhouse projects.
Re:Ownership? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can imagine how it went: google released the kit, Morfik read up on it, and realizsed he's screwed, so he went "legal" on the matter.
Risk is part of the business. It sure took a lot of time to develop his JS synthesis compilers, and it's terribly frustrating to see a competitor release a free alternative.
But here's the thing: if the most valuable thing in your product is an "idea" (the idea of roughly translating languages in JS spaghetti code) instead of the product itself, you'll be screwed sooner or later anyways.
Synthesis is a bridge for C++/Java/C# developers to get coding without learning the technology around "AJAX". It has no value to someone experienced in AJAX.
All of it: classes, typing, interfaces: it's all fake, and impossible to enforce in the runtime, since the runtime doesn't support it (save me the crap about Turing complete since I'm talking practical speed of execution here). So if the compiler doesn't catch it, you're basically screwed.
Re:Ownership? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my case though, after reading through my business plan a few times in denial, I came to the realization that I had accomplished a lot and learned a lot but that was all. There's always next time or the time after that.
If I would have wasted any more energy on it I would be in a much worse situation today.
Jefferson had no clue (Score:1, Interesting)
In the letter of 1813 where this passage appears, Jefferson expresses some skepticism about the general utility of patents:
"Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of a
Re:Ownership? (Score:2)
And from the post: Today Morfik came out fighting in defense of its product JST (Javascript Synthesis Technology).
I like how they say Morfik is 'defending' its product when they are the ones suing. The wording is meant to evoke sympathy for Morfik.
How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
Sounds like a pretty ambitions brief given the limitations
of javascript. Presumably you'd be very limited in what you
can do in the other language , for example I doubt some C++
database code would be cross-compiled successfully! Is it
meant just for people who only know VBscript or similar or
have they really tried to make it work with serious non-scripting
languages?
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:3, Insightful)
OMG it's turing-complete! Let's use it to render 3D movies!
This is the most tired and misunderstood argument to use: any general purpose modern language is turing-complete.
Let's patch our way by abusing the fact it's turing-complete! Runtime features don't matter! Filesize don't matter and the fact you may need a super-computer don't matter too!
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
So far the process doesn't seem to be completely transparent.
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
Too late. http://www.slimeland.com/raytrace/ [slimeland.com]
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
Nice experiment. Nonetheless: needs an hour to render one 800x600 frame with.. a sphere.
On a super-computer of course it doesn't matter.
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, one could just map the Javascript directly to a class file, and I believe Rhino does just that. However, that's not quite what the gransparent said, and even Rhino doesn't allow a flawless mapping from a Javascript class to a Java one (at least to the best of my knowledge). Classes in Java are just too static to entirely accomodate the more fluid Javascript object builder functions.
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
How about the Abstract Factory [dofactory.com] design pattern?
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
This would only work if all of the properties for a Javascript object were readily available at compile time, which is not necessarily the case. The first problem is that there's no foolproof way to know which properties listed will be added at run time. One could have add a property to an object dependant on the value of a randomly generated number, for instance.
The second problem is that objects in Javascript are also associative arrays (analogous to the M
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
Now that being said, that would be a very bad design. Aside from the fact that it would have horrible performance from all the requests that are sent to the p
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
Care to give a URL that will point to some device driver code
written in Javascript?
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
I think that says it all.
Re:How well does this cross-compilation work? (Score:2)
Language translators? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Language translators? (Score:3, Informative)
Ah-ha! Bingo..
http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/jsc.html [mozilla.org]
Re:Language translators? (Score:2)
wait for the real story... (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt that any company would go to court to defend a claim that they own programming language-to-language translation. If they are, then they'll lose or have the case tossed out.
More likely is that someone at Morfik looked at the output from the google toolkit and noticed that it was suspiciously similar to the output from their own ("we never got the parens to line up properly for a nested if and google's compiler messes up in exactly the same way... hmmm" -- or something like that).
Of course, this is just speculation. Still waiting for something resembling facts...
Re:wait for the real story... (Score:2, Funny)
On behalf of us all, I'd like to welcome you to Slashdot! Be sure to point out the lack of substance in TFA in the rousing discussion that will follow Taco's posting of this article tomorrow.
Prior art if there ever was (Score:5, Interesting)
I know of several Highlevel-to-Lowlevel language translators (e.g. Java-toC [arizona.edu], Oberon-to-C [uni-kl.de], you name it) that have been around for decades. Surely, you cannot get a patent for doing the same thing with a different language, can you. Can you?!?
Compiling something to JavaScript in the browser environment is about as obvious as compiling to C on Unix. Case in point, here are a few other X-to-JavaScript compilers pulled off the top of my head: Python [jtauber.com], Prolog [ioctl.org], Oberon [microsoft.com], etc. Seems pretty obvious to me. Not that that has ever prevented the US Patent Office from granting a patent, of course.
Re:Prior art if there ever was (Score:1)
To say nothing of this newfangled "FORTRAN-to-machine-code" thing...
Re:Prior art if there ever was (Score:1)
Re:Prior art if there ever was (Score:1)
Re:Prior art if there ever was (Score:1)
Well done. (Score:5, Funny)
Can I suggest you invent a C-code to machine-code translator next (you could call it a "compiler"). It's the obvious next step in this genius innovation.
Struts did it first (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is, the solution that Morfik came up with is actually one of the two most obvious (to any software designer level IT professional that has done any significat amount of web-interface software design and programming) solutions for the "JavaScript libraries are not 100% standard and the language (the official name is ECMAScript) is bug-prone" problem. The solutions being:
Given the state of the USPTO i wouldn't be surprised in somebody already patented both "inovations"...
Re:Struts did it first (Score:1, Informative)
The OP is referring to Jakarta Struts by the Apache Group, http://struts.apache.org/ [apache.org]
Re:Struts did it first (Score:3, Interesting)
They did generate Javascript code from your Java code.
Not 100% directly - but it was there for special cases.
Anyway, it's a lame technology anyway - it seems more akin to a "meta" language and won't buy most people
Re:Struts did it first (Score:1)
Re:Who cares if it's bogus? (Score:5, Interesting)
How easily we trust the news today.
What if I tell you that there's no "case", Morfik doesn't threaten Google with case, Morfik didn't even mention to have claims against Google's kit, and it's all a speculation created by an overly eager reporter who tried to read between the lines in one of Morfik's press releases?
IP protection (Score:2)
JST technology (as well as any other similar one) resembles very closely to
You write down source code in a high level language like C++ and you get it translated into another target language like machine code.
The "other" language needs not to be at a lower level. You can translate from Fortran or LISP to C as well.
I'd like to see these stupid claims stop once and forever. Companies should focus more on business, research and, most importa
Re:Yet more reason (Score:2, Informative)
It was just one of 29 files fetched, 217,085 bytes in total, for the site's [ati.com] main page. Only the 36KB main page HTML content itself
What is "IP"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems this case is either a patent or copyright-issue, but by not stating what "IP" has been violated, TFA is totally meaningless and open for speculation and confusion of the worst sort.
There is in reality nothing called "Intellectual Property".
Re:What is "IP"? (Score:2)
There is, in reality, something called "Intellectual Property".
Its a subset of "Intangible Personal Property", itself a subset of "Property".
Similarly, there is a thing called "Property", even though actual property interests are governed by distinct (but sometimes overlapping) sets of case and statute law depending on whether the "property" involved is "real property", "tangible personal property", "intangible personal property", and even more spec
But is "IP" a useful abstraction? (Score:2)
There is, in reality, something called "Intellectual Property".
The question is whether "intellectual property" is a useful abstraction over copyright law, patent law, trademark law, trade secret law, and publicity law. What is the term of protection of "intellectual property"? And especially for The Article, does a finding of infringement of "intellectual property" require access to the original work? Unlike mentioning a specific law (patent, copyright, or trade secret), "intellectual property" tells no
Another Javascript generator (Score:3, Informative)
http://haxe.org/intro [haxe.org]
Rich.
Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did Google had a close look at Morfik's technology? Yes!
Does GWT looks a lot like what Morfik has done? Having used Morfik WebOS ApsBuilder for a couple of months, and given the GWT demos and description: definitely YES!
And please keep in mind Morfik's tool has A LOT more nice things! It is like Visual Studio and like Borland Delphi but for the Web, i.e. true RAD development invironment! And yes, it supports not just Java, but c#, Pascal and VB. It can target both Linux and Windows WebServers. Go see yoursef!
Sto
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:1)
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:2)
Morfik is screwed. Cross-compilers are as old as the industry itself. Heck, one of the examples you cited (Delphi) was implemented as a cross-compiler (pascal to c).
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:2)
Nope - I saw the same thing, and it was that the INTERFACE was written entirely in Delphi. The compiler at the back end was Borland's c compiler.
When Delphi first came out, a lot of us bitched and moaned because we wanted a C version instead. Borlands explanation was that it was a lot more complex to support the whole C language, as opposed to the pascal language (and the single-inheritance model of pascal, which btw sux).
If you think of the keywords and features in pascal, its not that hard to "suppor
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:2)
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:1)
Correct.
However, the back-end of the Windows delphi program was borland's c compiler, not the dos-based pascal compiler, which they didn't port to windows.
Really? What was that "Turbo Pascal for Windows" product they released in 1991, then?
I'd love to see some actual reliable sources to support your claim, if you have any. See, Pascal's design isn't actually as similar to C's as you seem to think. It's not easy to write a direct translator.
If you care to look,
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:2)
The "Turbo Pascal for Windows" product was a woebegone POS that never did much, and wasn't missed.
Also, its VERY easy to translate pascal's much simpler syntax to something a c compiler can handle. Consider: no need for multiple inheritance, friend functions, etc.
In the case of Delphi, where pointers are all hidden away from you, the task is even easier.
Now if you want to see something REALLY interesting, look at what the gnu guys are doing with gcc - making a java compiler that compile - not just to
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:2)
Delphi doesn't hide pointers at all and it compiles directly to executable, there is no C-translation phase.
It's also one of the fastest compilers ever.
Nice try though.
(Was a professional Delphi developer for a number of years)
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:1)
Can you substantiate that statement?
You obviously have some sort of stake in Morfik, so you might want to exercise some judgement when making specific claims about this.
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:1)
Where in that statement does it actually say that Google definitively saw confidential Morfik WebOS demos? Further, from the press release quoted in TFA:
Re:Ok, is this IP infringement? (Score:2)
IT sounds similiar to me to the SCO Unix case. See Linux also has AWK! THey look identical!
Seems like ... (Score:1, Funny)
1. Come up with a general (and funny) claim..
2. Attack Google
3. Profit!
Re:Seems like ... (Score:1)
This is futile (Score:1)
Missing the point (Score:1)
So rather than this being a frivolous suit brought to bear (if it is ever brought to bear, see the point about how this suit might not even
Re:Missing the point (Score:2)
If people were just wanting to be mean, they'd be talking about how stupid he looks or something else just as pointless.
Instead, we have most people pointing out that what this guy claims IP is completely bogus. He shouldn't have even started out with the
Re: (Score:2)
Do Some Research (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do Some Research (Score:1)
Re:Do Some Research (Score:1)
First, can anyone even find the patent application [pathf.com]?
Second, I've used Morfik WebOS ApplicationBuilder (did I get the caps right? ;-) for some evaluation POC's and have some familiarity with it. Can't say I'm a big fan of it's kludgy IDE interface. Right click doesn't bring up anything useful so you're making trips to the top menu bar all the time. Hopefully, they'll clean it up soon.
It (Morfik) also isn't the sort of thing you'd want to write a little sidebar widget in, which is about all GWT seems to be
Patent Pending (Score:2)
What, now you can assert patents that haven't even been granted yet?! What if the patent application is denied?
BTW, I have a pending patent on replying to comments on Slashdot. You all owe me $100 per comment. BTW, I'm going to vigorously defend my intellectual property by hiring two goons named Victor and Anthony to collect my license fees. Have a
utter stupidity (Score:2)
Are we now going to see a series of patents on "translating language X into language Y" for all combinations of X and Y? Morfik's patent should be rejected, and it's a shame that the company can't be punished severely for even attempting to file such a patent.
In addition, Morfik's claims should be clearly recognized by everybody for what they are: an attempt to create far reaching new rights that
The point (Score:1)
AJAX (its no longer a buzzword people, its essentially now in the vernacular) is still very new and on wobbly legs, but there's no denying the doors it has already opened. We're only just beginning to get a glimpse of the lands these doors lead to.
Here's a small company from the smallest, most remote state of Australia made up of a handful of developers and associated staff, and look at who appears to be sampling their wares? This is a David and Goliath situation,
"Intellectual property" is a confusing term (Score:2)
I believe they have no intention of using the "dark side" of IP. They are simply using IP for the reasons it exists.
Use of "intellectual property" as a blanket term is the dark side [gnu.org]. It confuses patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, which have different scopes, different durations, different requirements to defend, and more differences than I care to list. The only thing the laws subsumed under "intellectual property" have in common is that they grant some sort of exclusive right that can
Language Translators (Score:2)
If thi
parenscript ? (Score:1)
C for yourself, PostScript for NeWS! (Score:2)
The NeWS [wikipedia.org] window system was programmed in PostScript, and was the original "AJAXian" window system, except that it used PostScript instead of JavaScript, PostScript instead of XML, and PostScript instead of DHTML, so it was much more consistent and vastly better designed than JavaScript and AJAX.
Some people didn't prefer programming directly in PostScript, so there were several projects to compile high level languages into PostScript code for NeWS:
In 1987, Dave Singer at Schlumberger wrote LispScript [google.com],