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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Authored by: Chromatix on Friday, May 25 2012 @ 03:43 PM EDT
IIRC, javac doesn't care about entry points. It will happily compile a Java program containing multiple entry points or none at all.

A program written in Java language, using only the common APIs between Java SE and Android, and providing both entry points required by each runtime environment (essentially an API provided by the program to the runtime), will run correctly on both platforms.

You have to pay attention to achieve that, but it's not at all difficult.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

In other words, just like Open32
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 25 2012 @ 03:59 PM EDT
Back in the OS/2 days, IBM did the same thing to make it easier for developers
to port Win32 (95/NT) applications to OS/2 by implementing the most commonly
used Win32 APIs which allowed about 90-95% of existing Win32 code to be used
as-is. That code would later be used by Wine and Odin (Wine for OS/2) which
helped considerably. Oh, and IBM only had a license for Win16 code (Win-OS/2),
not Windows 9x/NT.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Subset
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 25 2012 @ 11:59 PM EDT
The Sony BIOS that Connectrix made a re-implementation of was not a device, either.

It was a piece of software that was part of a platform (the Sony PlayStation) for running other software (PlayStation games). It contained APIs for functions meant to be used by those games. Connectrix reverse-engineered the Sony BIOS to learn the ideas and the functional requirements of those APIs, and then wrote--from scratch--their own implementation of a compatible replacement for that BIOS, which necessarily implemented the same APIs. But not all of them: they only implemented some of the API functions, the ones which they deemed useful for their compatibility goals. They did this to make their own "VGS" platform which was "compatible" in the sense that it could run PlayStation games.

It compares nicely to this case: The 51 packages are part of a piece of software (Oracle's Java class library) which is part of a platform (Java 2 Standard Edition) for running other software (applications written in Java). Apache Harmony collected info on the APIs and then wrote--from scratch--their own compatible implementation, which necessarily implemented the same APIs. Google then took Apache Harmony's new implementation and made it part of Android, so it would have compatible APIs. But they didn't provide reimplementations of all of the packages from the J2SE platform, only the ones which they deemed useful for their compatibility goals.

Connectrix needed 100% binary compatibility for any APIs actually used by a PlayStation game. But Android doesn't need that. It just needed source-level (and .class-level) API compatibility for the functionality that was common to both platforms. Because that would make it much easier for programmers to use their API knowledge, and existing Java code, on Android. And because the common APIs would enhance the value (to programmers, and indirectly to users) of *both* platforms.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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