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java.net.Socket is a lot better than inet.h | 394 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Couldn't Copyright individually
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 | # ]

java.net.Socket is a lot better than inet.h
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 | # ]

Couldn't Copyright individually
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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